But what has
post-structuralism got to do with it?
Mostly I'm just giving a name to it all:) Post-structuralism, as a theory, probably doesn't deserve all the blame I give it -- it was a theory that became popular because it mirrored society, it didn't make society mirror it.
I understand that people express their true values and moral convictions in many different ways, and the formalized, vocal expression is just one of these. We seldom really say what we believe, we believe something and then come up with a reason so we can defend our intuitive beliefs. Real moral judgements just aren't made other ways -- not by me or others. And, really, a big part of RMS's nature is a pricipled, even legalistic method of judgement. If he didn't believe in Free Software, he'd probably be as single-minded about something else. And not everyone can, or probably should do that. Though it hardly matters what people should do in this case -- if people should do something that they simple can't, then the idea of "should" is messed up.
Post-structuralism does offer some interpretation of this problem. But then it goes a step further -- because there is an inconsistency between what people think they believe and what they really believe, post-structuralists attack the entire notion of thinking you believe something. They attack the expression of belief. And when they do that, they attack nearly all expressions of belief between people -- there is a very real barrier of understanding between people, but post-structuralists take that barrier and present it as insurmountable.
Even this would all be okay, as a philosophical theory goes. But then it became a justification for a wild sort of relativism which defied attempts at making judgements of the world around us. (This is all mixed up with notions of tolerance and stereotyping as well) The philosophy became an excuse to not allow others to judge us, and to pretend that we are immune from any sense of truth or rightness. And that's sad. --
He is rigid, pro open-source, but very close-minded.
Did you read the article? All he could talk about is how much he wasn't Open Source, but Free Software. And if you read through to the bottom, you'll see that he changes his mind and supports the author.
And the GPL doesn't make you do anything -- it's a voluntary license, and this is explicitly noted in the license itself. There's no click-through, nothing that would in any way infringe on your fair-use rights. The GPL only gives, it doesn't take. --
By the way, when did you master that frightening discourse?
Awe, shucks. Well, I went to a small, liberal arts, Quaker college. And to top it off, there were lots of feminist wymmin there as well.
The discussions there were about different things -- politics, race, gender -- but far too often they turned in the same direction. You make a real statement, something with conviction, and they'd cut you down for it: just another example of the Western-based intellectual hegemony, attempting to invalidate other people's beliefs. Which would invalidate your belief -- but they never let that stop them. --
First, the philosophical foundation of "intellectual propery rights" is not at all firm. The constitution deams copyright pragmatically positive, but certainly does not give any impression that it is a "right". It is not widely present (in any form) in philosophical works. The average person has little real idea of what intellectual property even is, not to mention whether it's valid. It is certainly not a self-apparent moral right. So what kind of right is it? Is it mentioned in the Bible? I don't even recall seeing a copyright notice on the Bible.
Hoarding is generally considered to be negative -- even immoral -- in times of scarcity. All the more so when the scarcity is articificial, created by the hoarders themselves. And so it is with software -- people create artificial scarcity. I think this is a much more firmly grounded sense of morality than anything IP proponents bring up.
It is a valid and appropriate criticism that people should be compensated for their work, and there isn't a good system for doing this with Free Software. I would not condemn someone for making a living creating proprietary software. I'm sure RMS wouldn't either. It is unfortunate that our capitalist system, in its current configuration, demands that a person create artificial scarcity to receive compensation. In reality, most people as employees don't even get a choice of whether they want to act morally, and not just in the realm of software licensing, but in nearly all other ways as well. With the disempowered employee, and the intrinsically amoral (though not necessarily immoral) corporations with such strength... our society heads in dangerous directions. But I digress...
I understand these criticisms. They are very serious, and present a real challenge to Free Software. But Freedom == Choice does not relate to this criticism. Freedom == Choice is an attempt to create a fantastical and impossible ideal of freedom, then utilize this impossible notion to validate whatever the hell you want to do.
I'm not criticizing people for holding a different moral structure than mine (at least not right here) -- if this were the case, I would argue with them. I can't argue with Freedom == Choice even if I wanted to, because it's not a moral structure. That was what I was trying to point out. I don't want to be simply dismissive, but Freedom == Choice is a lode of bull, and is used by people that can't stand the idea that someone else would judge them, and then decide they can't stand the idea of judgement at all. When they do that, they don't create a moral structure, they try to destroy all moral structures. This is ultimately self-contradicting, but they don't seem to mind.
I don't think I'm contradicting myself. I don't think I'm as guilty as them. I will argue with them and judge them. I would like for them to judge me as well, on the correctness of my beliefs, not on whether having beliefs is OK. To judge is to create a thoughtful opinion on something or someone concrete. Without it, all those moral opinions are just theories. We should all be judging each other.
I hate post-structuralism with all my heart, I think it is a bane among youth, among activists, among potential believers of anything and everything, and that it has destroyed the Left from within. I hope, however, that its time is coming to a close. So I attack it pretty vehemently. --
According to RMS, we'll never be free until all software meets _his_
guidelines. Sure sounds like your friendly neighborhood dictator to me.
My god, to think someone would actually have a strong moral opinion on something! To think, someone would actually express that moral opinion in action, and ask that others do the same! This will certainly lead to the oppression and subjugation of all! Only if everyone believes in the post-structuralist undogma of unbelief, where no one gives a shit about anything, will we be free! We must dismiss and ignore anyone who does not follow our strict, but quintessencially tolerant, subjective viewpoints! Objectivity is the voice of reason, and reason is the voice of oppression! Relativism is the only right way!
I fear RMS will practice cultural genocide now, or maybe rape us in a figurative manner, or somehow try to invalidate our personal narratives. That's a dialog I just don't need. --
This constant Slashdot mantra of Freedom == Choice is both naive and self-centered.
Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. A society that is Free because it has no slavery, is not "free" by your definition because people aren't free to own slaves. A society that is politically Free is not "free" by your definition because people aren't free to politically surpress others.
Freedom always exists in context. We live in a society, and everything we do is strongly affected by those around us. The only way to ensure our freedom is to demand that the society actively protect our freedoms (and in turn, each of us individually protect each other's freedoms).
It is only in this way that support for freedom can make any sense. With your argument you rail against RMS for wanting you to use Free Software, all because you don't want to be condemned for using proprietary software. And yet, that proprietary software very clearly restricts what you can do. All RMS is saying is saying what he thinks you should do, but the proprietary software makers not only tell you what you should do, but what you must do (or not do), under threat of legal action. And RMS is the bad guy?
How does it help freedom to let a person sell themselves into slavery? How does it help freedom to impose voluntary censorship? How does it help freedom to accept proprietary software?
RMS views software in a moral and principled manner. This bothers you, because you don't do so, and you don't even want to be reminded of moral distinctions. If you had larger moral goals which proprietary software helped achieve, I could respect that -- even if I didn't agree with your goals, I would still respect you for having convictions. But I seriously doubt you -- or all the other free==choice advocates -- have any moral passion that drives you to be critical of those who do.
If you were a privacy advocate that developed encryption algorithms in the public domain so they could be used in proprietary programs, then it would make sense: you value privacy above the freedom of your code. If you were a misguided FBI programmer making closed email sniffing programs, at least I could see where you were coming from. And if you are someone who can only get a job developing closed software, then I can empathize. But why would you attack those who have chosen not to make compromises? If you learn RMS's convictions and say, "I cannot choose that path", that is a choice for you to make. But why do you fault RMS for expressing his convictions? Why do you fault him for defining what he thinks is right without compromise? Why do you fault him for making explicit the differences between his ideas, and the compromised and sanitized ideas of Open Source? --
RTL is the intermediate representation that GCC uses. The different front-ends for GCC (C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, and Pascal, I think) all compile into RTL, and then on that level optimizations are done and ultimately binaries created.
Now, as bytecodes, RTL would probably be very slow. It seems (to my most uninformed eye) to be very low-level: appropriate for compiling, but not for interpreting. But if you can make the entire compiling process robust, there's no reason that compiling should make something less portable, as long as you are willing to replace non-conformant OS-level code with your own (standardized) code. Lo and behold, such code even exists! GNU has been writing just this distributable code for a long time.
Now, I know there must be something wrong with this. As enticing as RTL seems, there must be a reason why people, say, compile languages into C instead of directly into RTL, e.g., many Eiffel compilers, Scheme compilers, ML compilers... and it took a long time for Pascal and Fortran frontends to come about.
It is also apparent when running cygwin on Windows that while the GNU code is portable to very different environments, it leaves something to be desired. But so far the GNU code has been written with Unix in mind. A little redirection could make for code with more portability in mind.
There's a lot of work to make such a thing really happen -- but all the pieces are there, and they are more proven than Java et al. GCC is ported to a wide variety of platforms. Compiled programs run fast. RTL is, at least, somewhat language-agnostic (though I'm sure much more could be done -- all the C variants, plus Pascal and Fortran, share a lot in common).
I'm sure there's a flaw in this... but I'm not entirely sure what it is.
--
Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World
Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but
to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of
the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."
Okay, I'll let people make their own judgements on how insane this author is. --
I've been pretty happy with Python for CGI, but I haven't done database stuff with it. Of course, Zope is the ultimate web everything-you-could-want, but it's also a big commitment, and the documentation sucks very badly (which I consider a real problem). The Python documentation is quite good, though.
If you are happy with doing CGI at a raw sort of level -- you get a dictionary (hash-table) of posted variable and print to stdout -- then there's no reason you can't do it in Python.
If you want to see a moderate-sized CGI program, you can look at ComfyEdit, which I made. I think it's reasonably accessibly while still having some novelty. Well, no, I take that back -- I just looked at it, and it's really rather monolithic.
--
Still it does leave me with a dilemma though. Do I utterly ignore the national party's platform? If the platform was
constructed democratic means, it must reflect what the Greens stand for, right?
The current platform and the larger goals are somewhat different. If you disagree with the larger goals of the Green party, then it wouldn't make sense to be a part of them, and you might not want to vote for them.
The Green party is very anti-corporate. The dismantling of the top corporations just isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon. But there are a lot of smaller issues where, on a local level or elsewhere, the Greens could have an impact. Do you think corporate power should be fought, maybe even just for the sake of fighting corporate power?
Before you think that's reactionary, fighting crime for the sake of fighting crime isn't usually considered reactionary. And if you really consider the power held by corporations -- amorphous entities without will or conscience except for the profit motive -- there are real reasons to oppose them on principle. At least the publically traded corporations.
Do you feel protecting and restoring the environment is important enough to make real and tangible sacrifices for that goal? And to make those sacrifices as a society, not just as individuals? There are ongoing debates even among environmentalists as to what the most useful for the environment -- and a platform that supports one thing this year may change as science and the evolution of events continue. But the commitment is a defining aspect of the Green party.
Really, this "stick to the issues" bend that the Republican/Democratic party has gone with in the presidential race is a total farce. When the president gets in office, the truly important decisions won't have been discussed as issues. Even if they did a better job of discussion a wider range of issues, the flow of events will always be important in any decision. To vote on those issues is impracticle -- you have to trust the candidate, and to a degree the party, to make the right decision from the right fundamental principles.
I'll let you decide on what the Democratic/Republican principles really are, but past actions make it pretty clear. NAFTA, WTO, UCITA, CDA, CDA II, low capital gains tax, highest military funding ever, Carnivore, bombing Iraq, steadily declining value of the minimum wage, steadily increasing length of copyrights, more H1-B visas... some of these you might agree with, some you might not. Potentially a candidate could break out of the path their party has chosen, but I don't think Bush or Gore show the slightest inclination to do so.
Do you agree with the what the government has done? Do you want them to keep doing it? You can assign various things you like and don't like to one of the two faces of the powers-that-be, but it won't really matter. What goes on in Washington is mostly stuff they don't talk about on the news, they don't debate in congress, and just happens whether we like it or not. It goes on with the full complicity of both parties. They like the abortion issue because it gives them a good reason to squabble, but when the business of the country gets done everyone plays the game.
There's a good chance that you are doing well financially. Many on/. are. But most of us here will do fine however things go, like it or not we're among the privileged elite. And, more or less safe, we can rise above self-interest. We can show real concern about what goes on in the world. Do you want to? Do you believe a vote for Bush or Gore represents this?
These are the things you should consider when you wonder if you should support the Greens. --
Well, I have a philosophical difference here. The problem with our system is that it has a bug: the mathematical relation
of "preference" is nontransitive when measured over the populace.
It should be noted that this bug is solvable on the state level: federal or constitutional reform is not necessary. States are free to come up with the method for choosing their electoral college votes. A run-off system without winner-takes-all (which would solve this nasty bug) is not that difficult to attain.
Well, still not that easy. But at least within the realm of reason.
Have you actually looked into what the green party stands for? Nader is running as their candidate, but he's really not
one of them, or at least he disavows some of their positions and doesn't run on their platform.
It makes sense to vote for a candidate who you believe to have the character to make the right decision on future matters. In the same way, a party is not just its platform, but a system and a process for coming to that platform.
The Green's platform reflects the beliefs of their members, who at the moment tend to be radical leftists (radical, because they haven't given up, not because they are crazy)
I don't think the Democratic or the Republican platforms really represent their members. If you became active in the Greens you would actually have a reasonable chance to change their direction in a number of ways -- if not nationally, at least locally.
Here in Chicago, under the Democratic Machine, you just can't do that. There is little I can do to make the Democrats reflect my beliefs (and the Republicans are just further yet).
A platform can and will change, but the party process underneith that platform is much more static. The Green Party's process is democratic. The Republican and Democratic parties don't even come close.
--
Could someone who has worked in an HR department explain why nobody seems to read
resumes?
I've never worked in HR, but knowing someone who does...
Electronic submission has made it worse. Any job position gets a boatload of resumes, many of which aren't particularly qualified (though it typically doesn't help when ads always ask for more than they could expect to get).
Compound that with resumes that inflate and exagerate -- not only do you have to sift through all the resumes, but you have to determine what they really mean.
HR has brought this on themselves, of course -- they respond to bullshit, they ask for bullshit, and so they get lots of bullshit. But even an enlightened individual in HR can't change the system.
--
It would only seem to be of value in those rare situations where the marginal gain
in processing is so profitable or desirable that it outweighs the marginal costs --
but places like that probably already buy bigger machines than Intel boxes.
I think it comes about when someone wants to scale something beyond its original capacity. Some program that is difficult to port to another operating system or architecture, is not multithreaded, and for the most part doesn't bottleneck in the OS (which probably is multithreaded).
Fixing any of these problems is almost certain to cost much more than a really fast processor. OTOH, a really fast processor only gives you a tiny edge performance-wise over a pretty fast processor. --
Do you know the difference between
qualified and nonqualified stock options?
I don't know the difference. Could some kind soul explain it, or refer me to a resource on the subject. I figure this is a short-essay worth of material, not a whole book:) --
A ported piece of software isn't going to really have much in the way of future maintainers. It is a conversion of an existing product, and the maintenance is going to take place primarily in the original version.
I.e., there's even more reason to keep the old code around, because you won't just be doing the original porting, you'll be porting the bugfixes as well.
Version control isn't good enough anyway. Commenting out the code makes it clear which piece of old code matches what replacement code. And when you want to do something based on the old code, you can search for that code, then find the new code that was written to replace it.
Programming rules are just suggestions, not laws. If it makes sense to break a rule, then you should. I know I would much rather maintain the ported code with the original code in comments. --
As other's have mentioned, lots of TLDs won't necessarily help. But they could help. Here's some I think would be good:
.movie (since every movie wants its own domain name... cell.movie, excorcist.movie, etc.
buy.movie would be dumb, though, and I'd hope they'd keep them out. Maybe.film, definately not both)
.museum (field.museum)
.law (kurneysmithjones.law or something)
.sex (obviously)
.game (starcraft.game, etc... only actual games, not sites about games)
.coop (wedge.coop)
.home (ianbicking.home -- only registration by individuals of their own name or variation on their name... maybe a different TLD, though....person)
.alt (free for all! But it can't mirror any other TLD)
Ones that might be good are:.art/.gallery,.hotel,.school (.edu might be too restrictive,.k12.xx.us, etc., aren't a great alternative).
But.web,.dvd,.pro,.biz,.wap, etc., are simply dumb. They are totally ambiguous -- how do you know if something should be a.com,.biz,.ecom, etc? I would be rightfully concerned if I had mybusiness.com and someone else registered mybusiness.ecom. The other TLDs have to actually mean something, and be exclusive of the generic online-business/zine/community/whatever that is.com/.org/.net. If someone registered mybusiness.hotel, it wouldn't really matter to me. --
I couldn't disagree more. Large amounts of commented out code make programs
unreadable. Why was it commented out? Was it test code? An older version?
Something that wouldn't compile but needs to be fixed?
He was commenting out the code because it was being replaced, but only for the port. The commented code is still the reference implementation, and the new code (which would be located right next to the comment) is meant to implement the same thing. So if you find a bug, you can reread the original code, check it against the new code, and maybe find where you went wrong.
Maybe "never comment out code" is a good rule of style for source once the original author lets it go, but it's just style. When doing a port or conversion, you'd be throwing away good information not to leave commented code. --
'Go outside and play, let the wind blow the stink off of ya.' Idle
hands are the devils playground.
Umm... those contradict, don't they? At least, I know when I went outside to play, it was seldom anything other than "idleness". Oh, sure, I found ways to occupy myself... but there was never a "purpose" or a "goal" which I had in mind. I was most certainly idle.
Poor kids these days (well, even a lot of kids in my day) -- they don't get any idleness. Their misconcerned parents structure their entire day, don't let them play idlely, and always want to know what they are doing. They don't get to make the mistakes that a kid should be allowed to make -- starting fires, digging through garbage cans, making crude weapons, getting in fights, etc. These are how kids learn, figure out who they are, ease their way into independance.
Keeping kids from doing what they shouldn't doesn't usually work. Thankfully, because that would be to destroy childhood. Kids need some shielding, but they shouldn't be protected from themselves. If you really want to protect your kid, it's a much more difficult and subtle process than looking over their shoulder all the time -- you have to teach them to protect themselves. --
Remove all porn and such sites from every other TLD, and replace it with a.sex (or.porn) site.
Example: hotteensex.com becomes hotteensex.sex. Then, all you have to do is block the entire
TLD.
Like the NC-17 rating, this could harm any sexual site that wasn't porn, or a site that was only partially pornographic.
With all the porn segregated into a small, easily detected part of the net, the wide-spread censoring of these areas is innevitable. ISPs, libraries, places of employment will all ban anything with the.sex TLD.
Now, I think a.xxx or.sex TLD would be a good idea -- fair advertising and all. But I don't think anyone should be forced to register under that name. That would just be asking for censorship. Sex is really important to our culture and to human interaction as a whole. To group all sexual works, even all explicit sexual works, in a category that will be marked "porn" is to cause serious harm to those works.
Perhaps the time has come to fork the older machines.. Few of us run Linux on anything less
powerful than a Pentium, and even fewer on a 486.
A 486 has a lot more in common with the computer I'm running now than does anything with 256Gb of RAM. None of the patches for big iron have anything to offer me or the vast majority of people who run Linux on modest hardware.
If 486's weren't supported it probably wouldn't be that big a deal -- there's little lost in running a 2.0 kernel, and in the future that will probably remain true. (We should face it -- the kernel is really rather boring) But getting rid of 486 support wouldn't help much. --
Of
course, the best way to assure your protection is to run a public remailer yourself--that way you
can be sure that at least one remailer in your chain will forward no previous headers and keep no
logs. Then, you have absolute deniability even if traffic analysis hints at your involvement with the
message in question
That wouldn't quite work, would it? Part of the security of remailers is wide use, since it's possible to detect that a particular computer communicated from the remailer, and it's not really possible to hide the remailer itself from the recipient. So, if you had your own remailer and few others used it (as would probably be the case unless you invested a lot of effort into advertising it), it would be a good guess that anything coming from the remailer is essentially coming from you.
While delays and other chaft could be used to partially obscure the activities of the remailer, it wouldn't be much more secure than normal mail, in terms of being trackable. --
The CPU usage on the server scares a lot of people away from this - it's not a big deal
for static content (zip once and cache), but for dynamic sites (say,/.) gzipping 5-700K
of text each time would kill a loaded server pretty quickly...
If you have enough bandwidth to waste on putting 80% of redundant (compressable) data over it, but you don't have enough computer power to run gzip on that data, your resource allocation is seriously messed up. Fast computers to gzip the data are a lot cheaper than fat pipes to send it.
The only place where it might not make sense is in an academic environment where (for artificial reasons) the bandwidth is very cheap, and the servers might still be overwhelmed. --
Not to defend MS too much, but I think they went with My Network Places because Network Neighborhood became My Network Places\Computers Near Me
The other thing is MS likes to use terminology to lock people in. E.g., "shortcuts" instead of "links". This attempts to make MS product-users unable to converse with and understand the rest of the networked world. --
Ah, you mean like the wonderful way they chose "Program Files" to demonstrate their
"long filename" support "with spaces" which made it a pain to install all those old 16
bit programs. I mean, why not just call it "Programs"?
Actually, this is one of the few places where I think MS showed a little backbone in not overemphasizing backward-compatibility. Thanks to "Program Files" nearly every program would include full support for long names and spaces, where otherwise there would be a lazy minority that would still not support long filenames and spaces.
8.3 was awful, and as wordy as "Program Files" might be, it was worth getting rid of a bad scheme. --
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that people express their true values and moral convictions in many different ways, and the formalized, vocal expression is just one of these. We seldom really say what we believe, we believe something and then come up with a reason so we can defend our intuitive beliefs. Real moral judgements just aren't made other ways -- not by me or others. And, really, a big part of RMS's nature is a pricipled, even legalistic method of judgement. If he didn't believe in Free Software, he'd probably be as single-minded about something else. And not everyone can, or probably should do that. Though it hardly matters what people should do in this case -- if people should do something that they simple can't, then the idea of "should" is messed up.
Post-structuralism does offer some interpretation of this problem. But then it goes a step further -- because there is an inconsistency between what people think they believe and what they really believe, post-structuralists attack the entire notion of thinking you believe something. They attack the expression of belief. And when they do that, they attack nearly all expressions of belief between people -- there is a very real barrier of understanding between people, but post-structuralists take that barrier and present it as insurmountable.
Even this would all be okay, as a philosophical theory goes. But then it became a justification for a wild sort of relativism which defied attempts at making judgements of the world around us. (This is all mixed up with notions of tolerance and stereotyping as well) The philosophy became an excuse to not allow others to judge us, and to pretend that we are immune from any sense of truth or rightness. And that's sad.
--
And the GPL doesn't make you do anything -- it's a voluntary license, and this is explicitly noted in the license itself. There's no click-through, nothing that would in any way infringe on your fair-use rights. The GPL only gives, it doesn't take.
--
The discussions there were about different things -- politics, race, gender -- but far too often they turned in the same direction. You make a real statement, something with conviction, and they'd cut you down for it: just another example of the Western-based intellectual hegemony, attempting to invalidate other people's beliefs. Which would invalidate your belief -- but they never let that stop them.
--
Hoarding is generally considered to be negative -- even immoral -- in times of scarcity. All the more so when the scarcity is articificial, created by the hoarders themselves. And so it is with software -- people create artificial scarcity. I think this is a much more firmly grounded sense of morality than anything IP proponents bring up.
It is a valid and appropriate criticism that people should be compensated for their work, and there isn't a good system for doing this with Free Software. I would not condemn someone for making a living creating proprietary software. I'm sure RMS wouldn't either. It is unfortunate that our capitalist system, in its current configuration, demands that a person create artificial scarcity to receive compensation. In reality, most people as employees don't even get a choice of whether they want to act morally, and not just in the realm of software licensing, but in nearly all other ways as well. With the disempowered employee, and the intrinsically amoral (though not necessarily immoral) corporations with such strength... our society heads in dangerous directions. But I digress...
I understand these criticisms. They are very serious, and present a real challenge to Free Software. But Freedom == Choice does not relate to this criticism. Freedom == Choice is an attempt to create a fantastical and impossible ideal of freedom, then utilize this impossible notion to validate whatever the hell you want to do.
I'm not criticizing people for holding a different moral structure than mine (at least not right here) -- if this were the case, I would argue with them. I can't argue with Freedom == Choice even if I wanted to, because it's not a moral structure. That was what I was trying to point out. I don't want to be simply dismissive, but Freedom == Choice is a lode of bull, and is used by people that can't stand the idea that someone else would judge them, and then decide they can't stand the idea of judgement at all. When they do that, they don't create a moral structure, they try to destroy all moral structures. This is ultimately self-contradicting, but they don't seem to mind.
I don't think I'm contradicting myself. I don't think I'm as guilty as them. I will argue with them and judge them. I would like for them to judge me as well, on the correctness of my beliefs, not on whether having beliefs is OK. To judge is to create a thoughtful opinion on something or someone concrete. Without it, all those moral opinions are just theories. We should all be judging each other.
I hate post-structuralism with all my heart, I think it is a bane among youth, among activists, among potential believers of anything and everything, and that it has destroyed the Left from within. I hope, however, that its time is coming to a close. So I attack it pretty vehemently.
--
I fear RMS will practice cultural genocide now, or maybe rape us in a figurative manner, or somehow try to invalidate our personal narratives. That's a dialog I just don't need.
--
Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. A society that is Free because it has no slavery, is not "free" by your definition because people aren't free to own slaves. A society that is politically Free is not "free" by your definition because people aren't free to politically surpress others.
Freedom always exists in context. We live in a society, and everything we do is strongly affected by those around us. The only way to ensure our freedom is to demand that the society actively protect our freedoms (and in turn, each of us individually protect each other's freedoms).
It is only in this way that support for freedom can make any sense. With your argument you rail against RMS for wanting you to use Free Software, all because you don't want to be condemned for using proprietary software. And yet, that proprietary software very clearly restricts what you can do. All RMS is saying is saying what he thinks you should do, but the proprietary software makers not only tell you what you should do, but what you must do (or not do), under threat of legal action. And RMS is the bad guy?
How does it help freedom to let a person sell themselves into slavery? How does it help freedom to impose voluntary censorship? How does it help freedom to accept proprietary software?
RMS views software in a moral and principled manner. This bothers you, because you don't do so, and you don't even want to be reminded of moral distinctions. If you had larger moral goals which proprietary software helped achieve, I could respect that -- even if I didn't agree with your goals, I would still respect you for having convictions. But I seriously doubt you -- or all the other free==choice advocates -- have any moral passion that drives you to be critical of those who do.
If you were a privacy advocate that developed encryption algorithms in the public domain so they could be used in proprietary programs, then it would make sense: you value privacy above the freedom of your code. If you were a misguided FBI programmer making closed email sniffing programs, at least I could see where you were coming from. And if you are someone who can only get a job developing closed software, then I can empathize. But why would you attack those who have chosen not to make compromises? If you learn RMS's convictions and say, "I cannot choose that path", that is a choice for you to make. But why do you fault RMS for expressing his convictions? Why do you fault him for defining what he thinks is right without compromise? Why do you fault him for making explicit the differences between his ideas, and the compromised and sanitized ideas of Open Source?
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Now, as bytecodes, RTL would probably be very slow. It seems (to my most uninformed eye) to be very low-level: appropriate for compiling, but not for interpreting. But if you can make the entire compiling process robust, there's no reason that compiling should make something less portable, as long as you are willing to replace non-conformant OS-level code with your own (standardized) code. Lo and behold, such code even exists! GNU has been writing just this distributable code for a long time.
Now, I know there must be something wrong with this. As enticing as RTL seems, there must be a reason why people, say, compile languages into C instead of directly into RTL, e.g., many Eiffel compilers, Scheme compilers, ML compilers... and it took a long time for Pascal and Fortran frontends to come about.
It is also apparent when running cygwin on Windows that while the GNU code is portable to very different environments, it leaves something to be desired. But so far the GNU code has been written with Unix in mind. A little redirection could make for code with more portability in mind.
There's a lot of work to make such a thing really happen -- but all the pieces are there, and they are more proven than Java et al. GCC is ported to a wide variety of platforms. Compiled programs run fast. RTL is, at least, somewhat language-agnostic (though I'm sure much more could be done -- all the C variants, plus Pascal and Fortran, share a lot in common).
I'm sure there's a flaw in this... but I'm not entirely sure what it is.
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If you are happy with doing CGI at a raw sort of level -- you get a dictionary (hash-table) of posted variable and print to stdout -- then there's no reason you can't do it in Python.
If you want to see a moderate-sized CGI program, you can look at ComfyEdit, which I made. I think it's reasonably accessibly while still having some novelty. Well, no, I take that back -- I just looked at it, and it's really rather monolithic.
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To end on satire...
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The Green party is very anti-corporate. The dismantling of the top corporations just isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon. But there are a lot of smaller issues where, on a local level or elsewhere, the Greens could have an impact. Do you think corporate power should be fought, maybe even just for the sake of fighting corporate power?
Before you think that's reactionary, fighting crime for the sake of fighting crime isn't usually considered reactionary. And if you really consider the power held by corporations -- amorphous entities without will or conscience except for the profit motive -- there are real reasons to oppose them on principle. At least the publically traded corporations.
Do you feel protecting and restoring the environment is important enough to make real and tangible sacrifices for that goal? And to make those sacrifices as a society, not just as individuals? There are ongoing debates even among environmentalists as to what the most useful for the environment -- and a platform that supports one thing this year may change as science and the evolution of events continue. But the commitment is a defining aspect of the Green party.
Really, this "stick to the issues" bend that the Republican/Democratic party has gone with in the presidential race is a total farce. When the president gets in office, the truly important decisions won't have been discussed as issues. Even if they did a better job of discussion a wider range of issues, the flow of events will always be important in any decision. To vote on those issues is impracticle -- you have to trust the candidate, and to a degree the party, to make the right decision from the right fundamental principles.
I'll let you decide on what the Democratic/Republican principles really are, but past actions make it pretty clear. NAFTA, WTO, UCITA, CDA, CDA II, low capital gains tax, highest military funding ever, Carnivore, bombing Iraq, steadily declining value of the minimum wage, steadily increasing length of copyrights, more H1-B visas... some of these you might agree with, some you might not. Potentially a candidate could break out of the path their party has chosen, but I don't think Bush or Gore show the slightest inclination to do so.
Do you agree with the what the government has done? Do you want them to keep doing it? You can assign various things you like and don't like to one of the two faces of the powers-that-be, but it won't really matter. What goes on in Washington is mostly stuff they don't talk about on the news, they don't debate in congress, and just happens whether we like it or not. It goes on with the full complicity of both parties. They like the abortion issue because it gives them a good reason to squabble, but when the business of the country gets done everyone plays the game.
There's a good chance that you are doing well financially. Many on /. are. But most of us here will do fine however things go, like it or not we're among the privileged elite. And, more or less safe, we can rise above self-interest. We can show real concern about what goes on in the world. Do you want to? Do you believe a vote for Bush or Gore represents this?
These are the things you should consider when you wonder if you should support the Greens.
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Well, still not that easy. But at least within the realm of reason.
It makes sense to vote for a candidate who you believe to have the character to make the right decision on future matters. In the same way, a party is not just its platform, but a system and a process for coming to that platform.The Green's platform reflects the beliefs of their members, who at the moment tend to be radical leftists (radical, because they haven't given up, not because they are crazy)
I don't think the Democratic or the Republican platforms really represent their members. If you became active in the Greens you would actually have a reasonable chance to change their direction in a number of ways -- if not nationally, at least locally.
Here in Chicago, under the Democratic Machine, you just can't do that. There is little I can do to make the Democrats reflect my beliefs (and the Republicans are just further yet).
A platform can and will change, but the party process underneith that platform is much more static. The Green Party's process is democratic. The Republican and Democratic parties don't even come close.
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Electronic submission has made it worse. Any job position gets a boatload of resumes, many of which aren't particularly qualified (though it typically doesn't help when ads always ask for more than they could expect to get).
Compound that with resumes that inflate and exagerate -- not only do you have to sift through all the resumes, but you have to determine what they really mean.
HR has brought this on themselves, of course -- they respond to bullshit, they ask for bullshit, and so they get lots of bullshit. But even an enlightened individual in HR can't change the system.
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Fixing any of these problems is almost certain to cost much more than a really fast processor. OTOH, a really fast processor only gives you a tiny edge performance-wise over a pretty fast processor.
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I.e., there's even more reason to keep the old code around, because you won't just be doing the original porting, you'll be porting the bugfixes as well.
Version control isn't good enough anyway. Commenting out the code makes it clear which piece of old code matches what replacement code. And when you want to do something based on the old code, you can search for that code, then find the new code that was written to replace it.
Programming rules are just suggestions, not laws. If it makes sense to break a rule, then you should. I know I would much rather maintain the ported code with the original code in comments.
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.movie (since every movie wants its own domain name... cell.movie, excorcist.movie, etc.
buy.movie would be dumb, though, and I'd hope they'd keep them out. Maybe .film, definately not both) .museum (field.museum) .law (kurneysmithjones.law or something) .sex (obviously) .game (starcraft.game, etc... only actual games, not sites about games) .coop (wedge.coop) .home (ianbicking.home -- only registration by individuals of their own name or variation on their name... maybe a different TLD, though... .person) .alt (free for all! But it can't mirror any other TLD)
Ones that might be good are:But .web, .dvd, .pro, .biz, .wap, etc., are simply dumb. They are totally ambiguous -- how do you know if something should be a .com, .biz, .ecom, etc? I would be rightfully concerned if I had mybusiness.com and someone else registered mybusiness.ecom. The other TLDs have to actually mean something, and be exclusive of the generic online-business/zine/community/whatever that is .com/.org/.net. If someone registered mybusiness.hotel, it wouldn't really matter to me.
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Maybe "never comment out code" is a good rule of style for source once the original author lets it go, but it's just style. When doing a port or conversion, you'd be throwing away good information not to leave commented code.
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Poor kids these days (well, even a lot of kids in my day) -- they don't get any idleness. Their misconcerned parents structure their entire day, don't let them play idlely, and always want to know what they are doing. They don't get to make the mistakes that a kid should be allowed to make -- starting fires, digging through garbage cans, making crude weapons, getting in fights, etc. These are how kids learn, figure out who they are, ease their way into independance.
Keeping kids from doing what they shouldn't doesn't usually work. Thankfully, because that would be to destroy childhood. Kids need some shielding, but they shouldn't be protected from themselves. If you really want to protect your kid, it's a much more difficult and subtle process than looking over their shoulder all the time -- you have to teach them to protect themselves.
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With all the porn segregated into a small, easily detected part of the net, the wide-spread censoring of these areas is innevitable. ISPs, libraries, places of employment will all ban anything with the .sex TLD.
Now, I think a .xxx or .sex TLD would be a good idea -- fair advertising and all. But I don't think anyone should be forced to register under that name. That would just be asking for censorship. Sex is really important to our culture and to human interaction as a whole. To group all sexual works, even all explicit sexual works, in a category that will be marked "porn" is to cause serious harm to those works.
A little nudity never hurt anyone.
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If 486's weren't supported it probably wouldn't be that big a deal -- there's little lost in running a 2.0 kernel, and in the future that will probably remain true. (We should face it -- the kernel is really rather boring) But getting rid of 486 support wouldn't help much.
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While delays and other chaft could be used to partially obscure the activities of the remailer, it wouldn't be much more secure than normal mail, in terms of being trackable.
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The only place where it might not make sense is in an academic environment where (for artificial reasons) the bandwidth is very cheap, and the servers might still be overwhelmed.
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The other thing is MS likes to use terminology to lock people in. E.g., "shortcuts" instead of "links". This attempts to make MS product-users unable to converse with and understand the rest of the networked world.
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8.3 was awful, and as wordy as "Program Files" might be, it was worth getting rid of a bad scheme.
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