Ugh. I don't understand this stuff. Would anyone mind enlightening me/solving this apparent paradox?
Big questions are not to be answered. When you answer them, they become small questions. You see, the potential is less when you have an answer, than when you don't have the exact answer in your mind. The greatest scientists of our times knew this, and studied both the mystic as well as intellectual "modern" science.
If you understand this, you are on your way to know less and less, but keep wondering about all aspects of life. That is when you are becoming more enlightened. If you are confused. Congratulations! It takes less ego to admit so, than to stomp everybody else around you for being "heretics";-)
Very interesting. Nice usage of buzzwords like death knell and cryofan, whatever that is.
TOP DOWN COMMUNICATIONS? Bravo!
I'm looking forward for your online video, whereby thy Words will be spouted onto the billions. But why wait, why not just make a video with sub $1000-equipment now and offer it as a download on a website?
Oh wait.. Troll. Yes. To delightful horrors of children everywhere, A new kindred has been born.
And no, i'm not a microsoft fanboy, i've been using Linux since 97 and I really like it where it shines. But if you have even a little objectivity you can't say the stuff they're putting here is not interesting...
That's ok.
It's just that as a real linux user you can appreciate the open source, the free price, the helpful documentation, forums and HOWTOs, the solutions tailored for experienced users, thin clients for for almost nothing compared to Windows Terminal Server, uber-cool backup solutions (BackupPC)
Don't take me wrong. I use XP at work and home, and Linux where it has merit, a volunteer organisation. It's just that you giving a vaporware-list, just doesn't make me want Vista anymore than I want to reinstall from Windows XP AGAIN.. How about waiting for a real product?
Microsoft should be sued over patents simply because they are lobbying and sneaking patent-laws here in EU. In spite of democratic elections in the EU parliament rejecting the idea, the EU commision, which is not elected, is trying to force the laws through all the time in an unprecedented coup in the history of EU.
There's no evil in this world. Just alot of ignorance, by which selfishness is the root.
Unless you define freedom, you're both lost arguing back and forth about two different subjects. No intelligent discussion can be made without agreeing on the basic definitions, and freedom is far from clear-cut to define. It depends on so many contexts it's almost impossible to discuss rationally, it's better to omit the word freedom entirely.
Privacy is an easier word, but there's many levels of privacy.
When you come back to the basics, the discussion either boils down to agreement or differences in preferences.
Why is it that when some imbecile like you comes along, you never get the talking down you deserve?
Stop stereotyping, asshole, values have nothing to do with gender.
I think you're you're mistaking gender and feminine and masculine energy. I'm sorry I didn't clarify that in my post, but I will try to give a short explanation here:
Even if you are a man, you possess some feminine qualities, and vica versa. Nobody is 100% feminine or 100% masculine, or if they are pretty close to 100%, they have some hormone imbalance (saw a documentary about that once).
Feminine energy or values is about nurturing, heart-connection, love, education, sharing and openness.
Masculine energy or values is about control, power, achievements, height, everything big and huge and pretty darn impressive and controlling.
Every human being display some balance of each in different settings, so this is again not about gender. Indeed, the balance can be totally opposite for a given gender, giving rise to homosexuality or behaviour which is seen as more appropriate for the other sex.
The world has been in an age of masuline energy dominating for quite some time (a few thousand of years), with the result of men ruling the world. Before that, societies with women ruling was the norm (believe it or not, but archeological finds and folklore confirms this). However, what we're seeing now is the rise of feminine energy again (this has been going on for the last hundreds of years). This marks a new age, because the imbalance of masculine energy has caused alot of war and suffering.
Feminine energy is indeed superior to masculine energy, because it doesn't lead to suffering, confusion and war, like masculine energy. This is, if you don't love war over peace though, so preferences may vary. However, a balance of both may become far superior to any of them alone, which can give rise to both love and power.
If you take responsibility for your own life, you don't blame anyone for "hyping" you up, or similarly. With a bit of introspection you see an honest mistake for a mistake and don't do it again. One mistake is natural, but we should strive to let it be a coin of lesson and not a pattern in our life.
Who can fix things when you blame someone else? You give away all your power to them. Only they can repair the imaginary "damage".
We are so quick to identify with the smaller situation we are in, forgetting the larger picture. Don't sell your smile so cheaply. Often we sell our smile for the slightest remark, or slightest loss. Instead, let it be the most precious thing you own, never selling your smile cheaply. Then you can go through anything with an adamant smile.
We discover new insects and bactera all the time, but discovering a new mammal kind of revives that scientific ambition in all of this that there really are some things out there that haven't been found.
In order for us to not cut our own oxygen supply, what we need is either an outside enemy or the likewise masculine value of attribution to new discoveries - just another conquest of a different kind.
What we really need is more feminine values, nurturing our wildlife and taking care of our own oxygen supply. It is also the heartful and intelligent thing to do.
It is often the most basic that needs to be stated over and over again, yes.
Free market relies, as everything else, on something more basic to human life: Namely our consciousness. If it is clouded with anger, hostility, personal issues, greed or outright distortions of reality, the free market is subject to this as everything else in life. In some ways, a free market and modern democracy alleviates this in two opposite ways:
A) In a free market, like the stock market, greed and sense of ownership ensures that often the right price for a product is found in a way better than any expert can predict.
B) In a democracy, the ignorance of the masses of every issue is solved by representative democracy. The representants will come to the conclusions independent of their voters to a certain extent.
These two diagonally opposite measures is really to alleviate limitations in our consciousness. If:
A)..people dropped their sense of ownership and shared all possessions freely, while also taking a responsible attitude for everyone and everything they encounter without requiring the threat of loss of personal value, a system based on greed would be wholly unnecessary. Of course, even if this worked very well for small populations of native americans, it may be harder to make it work for larger populations where citizens are more alienated towards eachother. It is just an idea to raise a point further down.
B)..the masses would be educated enough about every issue, we could impose direct democracy, where every voter would be expected to sensibly vote on every issue without personal interest. As it is now, the masses would simply vote for the most popular ideas mostly beneficial towards their own group. Representative democracy is here to lessen the pain of "tyranny of the majority".
Both the solution of A and B require the same measure, namely to lift off the ignorance of the masses, instead of relying on an external system to decide things for us through lower emotions such as greed and fear of loss.
So I believe spirituality is the answer toward all the growing problems of humankind. If you want to read some provoking thoughts on spirituality, you can read an earlier post about the difference between spirituality and religion. Often, people confuse spirituality with the external traditions, symbols, mantras, leaders, etc of established religions or sects. This is not really spirituality, just the package around it. Spirituality is that which unites every path, every human being, both religious and atheist. It is the unchanging core, and not just the wrappings which are always changing with time. The core of a muslim is the same as the core of a christian and the core of an atheist, etc. I recommend reading this earlier post to see the difference between spirituality and religion.
Either you come up with constructive critisism, or you're moaning. If you're moaning, you're not contributing and you can just as likely shut up. In fact, by moaning you are pulling the project down..
Neither Microsoft or the OSS community is helped with: This interface sucks! The people who made this are losers.
What helps is: This button can be named "Ok" according to standard Window-management pratices, so as to avoid confusion over what it really does (save the work and close the dialog). The navigation list can with advantage display the items in a hierarchical manner. etc..etc..
Instead of saying: This shit just doesn't work! (You can say it when home alone, but it just doesn't help when you yell it across the globe..)
This helps: I have a Megablaster nVidia 256MB card with 1 S-Video output blablabla. The arts-daemon fails to recognize it at start-up giving an error-message: etc...etc..
Searching on the internet and special forums for clues helps.
Even being polite and not expecting anyone to do free work for you, helps alot.
Since I'm running mostly KDE-applications and didn't hear of it before too late, I didn't use this. So I've followed the various HOWTOs for installing proprietary codecs and compiled kmplayer (which is The best player for Linux right now, do yourself a big favour and forget all others), installed Real Player for Linux (found a utility that converted the install-binary into a deb IIRC). My Linux box now plays more formats than my Windows-boxes (mainly because I don't really care about all those formats, it was just so that people would not complain about it).
To compile kmplayer was just an 'apt-get install libkde-dev' (or whatever the KDE-dev package was called) and then 'make && make install'. There are some breezy deb's around, and I made some myself (I like to have everything a deb), but the links didn't work unfortunately.
For the future, the Penguin Liberation Front for Ubuntu is aiming to provide packages not provided in the free / universe / multiverse repositories: http://wiki.ubuntu-fr.org/doc/plf
They didn't have too many packages last time, but enough to put them in sources.list. I will submit my kmplayer deb's to the proper maintainers now that my box is properly set up.
For the simplest installation, I would recommend Automatix though. I've heard alot of good about it, and messing around with all of that yourself takes alot of time and frustration. I mainly see computers as a tool to relieve me of work, but I also like that tool as good as it can be, so I put up with it.
In a civilized society, it's everybody's business to educate and raise the children.
The parents have a lot of influence, and I fully agree they have the main responsibility over their children. However to lay the total burden on the parents, is simply insane. Anyone can easily come up with excuses. That's the easy cop-out, which helps nobody. How many hours are parents and children together these days?
The children will meet many people in their young years. The time spent with these people will be more than with their parents. These involve: Relatives Babysitters Teachers Peers Trainers Shop owners Bus drivers Any random person
The more people neglecting and behaving like robots, as is very common in the big cities, the more alienated teens you will get. It's very nice to behave like a human, and treat others like humans even if you're probably never going to see them again too.
Treat people (children / teens are certainly no exception!) like crap, then don't expect anything else than crap back. It has always been that you get more crap from teens than anyone else, but that's part of their nature. That's why we're the adults to see them through a difficult period and love them for who they are anyways.
Sure, blame the programmer. In the meanwhile, the systems that run MySQL will continue to silently fail due to bugs, and distrupt your data, while those who run better database systems will catch the bug and fix it at an earlier stage.
If this is true that is. I saw something in vTigerCRM where if I store a long website URL into an account, it will just become shortened without any warning. So I'm inclined to believe this is true. That is *Very*, *Very*, *Seriously* foobar, IMHO.
A base Ubuntu-install is based entirely on Free Software (http://www.gnu.org./ As with Debian, you can add non-free sources yourself, for gettings codecs for Windows Media Player etc.
Suse has some parts Free and other parts proprietary, so it is not entirely Free Software. But you can download Suse free of charge (a more concise phrase).
I believe this is the main difference. Whenever you see the word "Free" or "free", you should always have the broader definition of Free in mind to see what fits.
Google is a publicly traded company. They by law has to keep shareholders interests (if they are legal). There is a difference between being ethical and being legal. When they say DO NO EVIL it may mean do legal things. They have never said we follow some ethics as dicatated by some religion or some community. As long as they do legal things there is no need for them to be afraid of anything.
Following the law has absolutely nothing to do with being good or evil.
Of course, good and evil are entirely subjective experiences. Already, there are people claiming that Google is evil since they have been cut off from the search engine. This is mostly Google-bombers making money on selling PageRanks to people. So who is evil and not really shows that it IS subjective, as stated.
Basically, it seems the "good" people are always those you fear or those who are "on the other side". This goes for both sides!
Are we intelligent beings? Sometimes, we get caught up in fear and dualism, which is ignorance. Other times, we are more clear. Intelligence is an ability to rise above that. While being attached, your opinions and actions are less objective to the reality.
Recognizing this, can free you from it. While denying it lets you sink deeper in the quagmire, while trying to convince everybody you're okay. You're really trying to convince yourself while sinking!
I for one, do not believe in good and evil. Rather, I recognize good and ignorance. You will often find that "evilness" and ignorance, is tightly bound. This is because the mind of such people is caught up, they are unable to think clearly. However, nobody is evil: Their mind can change at any time! Do you never change your mind?
As for the law: The tyrrants of the past and present, are they good then, because they dictate the law?
Sometimes, you even have to break the law to do something good for others!
Again, the law has absolutely nothing to do with it, and I believe Google is aware of this. I also believe they really wanted to have this slogan: To be good, if they had the balls for it. "To not be evil", really doesn't say much other than put you at more risk of becoming evil..
Too much and it will make the food inedible. Too little will make the food bland and tasteless.
The trick is not to be paralyzed from fear, but use it for good. To stay alive and avoid situations which are clearly not in the best interest of the people involved, securing your child, etc.
There is nothing wrong with fear, on the contrary, if you feel fear, then you're still alive. How about that!
If you still haven't tied yourself into Access proprietary formats, language and practices (we told you so it would be a bad idea), you can tie yourself now to KDE and Rekall: http://www.rekallrevealed.org/
Bonus-points for those who manage to tie themselves up in this _and_ MS Access or some other obscure format without having a path of migration ready.;-)
You might be interested in 'Rekall'. It is very much like Access, made by the KDE-team and commercially supported. You can make forms, reports and it works off a real MySQL or other ODBC-database.
I would've used Rekall if my requirements wasn't met in vTigerCRM, another excellent and commercially-backed OSS/Free Software.
And yes, unlike Kexi, GNU enterprise and lots of other projects, Rekall is actually mature (well, seems like it, I haven't run anything complex on it). The only downer is its lack of Web-interface, but there is something called Rekallweb showing that it is doable and maybe it will be done in a few years.
The term of a century for copyright law is chosen more or less just to correspond to the artist's lifetime.
That may well have been the intention from the start, but the length is now a lifetime PLUS 70 years: a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countri es'_copyright_length">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /List_of_countries'_copyright_length
There is now dispute wether current copyright will ever expire, since the media companies like Disney seem to extend the period when the next deadline is coming up.. The company then manage to rip off every folklore and everything in the public domain they can get their hands on, but never give anything back to the public domain, as was the entire intention behind both copyright and patent-laws..
Patent law is limited to about 20 years, that being the time it's considered "fair" to let you dominate the market for your invention. After that, the generics come, and you better have moved on to something new.
20 years to stifle the market. 20 years of software is ancient news. What software are you using that is 20 years old, except the RSA-algorithm, which was indeed patented..
I'm not cynical, but you need to present the correct facts.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. I don't understand this stuff. Would anyone mind enlightening me/solving this apparent paradox?
;-)
Big questions are not to be answered. When you answer them, they become small questions. You see, the potential is less when you have an answer, than when you don't have the exact answer in your mind. The greatest scientists of our times knew this, and studied both the mystic as well as intellectual "modern" science.
If you understand this, you are on your way to know less and less, but keep wondering about all aspects of life. That is when you are becoming more enlightened. If you are confused. Congratulations! It takes less ego to admit so, than to stomp everybody else around you for being "heretics"
Very interesting. Nice usage of buzzwords like death knell and cryofan, whatever that is.
TOP DOWN COMMUNICATIONS? Bravo!
I'm looking forward for your online video, whereby thy Words will be spouted onto the billions. But why wait, why not just make a video with sub $1000-equipment now and offer it as a download on a website?
Oh wait.. Troll. Yes. To delightful horrors of children everywhere, A new kindred has been born.
+5 FUNNY people!!
If you don't have a working implementation, why should you get a patent on something you're not even quite sure how will work out?
And as another poster said, this is obvious, along with 99.999% of the other patents filed each year.
People need to start thinking with their hearts. Intellect is going downhill these days..
And no, i'm not a microsoft fanboy, i've been using Linux since 97 and I really like it where it shines. But if you have even a little objectivity you can't say the stuff they're putting here is not interesting...
That's ok.
It's just that as a real linux user you can appreciate the open source, the free price, the helpful documentation, forums and HOWTOs, the solutions tailored for experienced users, thin clients for for almost nothing compared to Windows Terminal Server, uber-cool backup solutions (BackupPC)
Don't take me wrong. I use XP at work and home, and Linux where it has merit, a volunteer organisation. It's just that you giving a vaporware-list, just doesn't make me want Vista anymore than I want to reinstall from Windows XP AGAIN.. How about waiting for a real product?
Microsoft should be sued over patents simply because they are lobbying and sneaking patent-laws here in EU. In spite of democratic elections in the EU parliament rejecting the idea, the EU commision, which is not elected, is trying to force the laws through all the time in an unprecedented coup in the history of EU.
There's no evil in this world. Just alot of ignorance, by which selfishness is the root.
Unless you define freedom, you're both lost arguing back and forth about two different subjects. No intelligent discussion can be made without agreeing on the basic definitions, and freedom is far from clear-cut to define. It depends on so many contexts it's almost impossible to discuss rationally, it's better to omit the word freedom entirely.
Privacy is an easier word, but there's many levels of privacy.
When you come back to the basics, the discussion either boils down to agreement or differences in preferences.
Why is it that when some imbecile like you comes along, you never get the talking down you deserve?
Stop stereotyping, asshole, values have nothing to do with gender.
I think you're you're mistaking gender and feminine and masculine energy. I'm sorry I didn't clarify that in my post, but I will try to give a short explanation here:
Even if you are a man, you possess some feminine qualities, and vica versa. Nobody is 100% feminine or 100% masculine, or if they are pretty close to 100%, they have some hormone imbalance (saw a documentary about that once).
Feminine energy or values is about nurturing, heart-connection, love, education, sharing and openness.
Masculine energy or values is about control, power, achievements, height, everything big and huge and pretty darn impressive and controlling.
Every human being display some balance of each in different settings, so this is again not about gender. Indeed, the balance can be totally opposite for a given gender, giving rise to homosexuality or behaviour which is seen as more appropriate for the other sex.
The world has been in an age of masuline energy dominating for quite some time (a few thousand of years), with the result of men ruling the world. Before that, societies with women ruling was the norm (believe it or not, but archeological finds and folklore confirms this). However, what we're seeing now is the rise of feminine energy again (this has been going on for the last hundreds of years). This marks a new age, because the imbalance of masculine energy has caused alot of war and suffering.
Feminine energy is indeed superior to masculine energy, because it doesn't lead to suffering, confusion and war, like masculine energy. This is, if you don't love war over peace though, so preferences may vary. However, a balance of both may become far superior to any of them alone, which can give rise to both love and power.
This is a very interesting time to be living.
If you take responsibility for your own life, you don't blame anyone for "hyping" you up, or similarly. With a bit of introspection you see an honest mistake for a mistake and don't do it again. One mistake is natural, but we should strive to let it be a coin of lesson and not a pattern in our life.
Who can fix things when you blame someone else? You give away all your power to them. Only they can repair the imaginary "damage".
We are so quick to identify with the smaller situation we are in, forgetting the larger picture. Don't sell your smile so cheaply. Often we sell our smile for the slightest remark, or slightest loss. Instead, let it be the most precious thing you own, never selling your smile cheaply. Then you can go through anything with an adamant smile.
Then life can truly become Art of Living.
It is easy to put down anybody, but it takes some guts some intelligence, some courage to uplift people.
- Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
The best way nature reinvents man is death.
So you better reinvent yourself while living.
We discover new insects and bactera all the time, but discovering a new mammal kind of revives that scientific ambition in all of this that there really are some things out there that haven't been found.
In order for us to not cut our own oxygen supply, what we need is either an outside enemy or the likewise masculine value of attribution to new discoveries - just another conquest of a different kind.
What we really need is more feminine values, nurturing our wildlife and taking care of our own oxygen supply. It is also the heartful and intelligent thing to do.
It is often the most basic that needs to be stated over and over again, yes.
Free market relies, as everything else, on something more basic to human life: Namely our consciousness. If it is clouded with anger, hostility, personal issues, greed or outright distortions of reality, the free market is subject to this as everything else in life. In some ways, a free market and modern democracy alleviates this in two opposite ways:
..people dropped their sense of ownership and shared all possessions freely, while also taking a responsible attitude for everyone and everything they encounter without requiring the threat of loss of personal value, a system based on greed would be wholly unnecessary. Of course, even if this worked very well for small populations of native americans, it may be harder to make it work for larger populations where citizens are more alienated towards eachother. It is just an idea to raise a point further down.
..the masses would be educated enough about every issue, we could impose direct democracy, where every voter would be expected to sensibly vote on every issue without personal interest. As it is now, the masses would simply vote for the most popular ideas mostly beneficial towards their own group. Representative democracy is here to lessen the pain of "tyranny of the majority".
A) In a free market, like the stock market, greed and sense of ownership ensures that often the right price for a product is found in a way better than any expert can predict.
B) In a democracy, the ignorance of the masses of every issue is solved by representative democracy. The representants will come to the conclusions independent of their voters to a certain extent.
These two diagonally opposite measures is really to alleviate limitations in our consciousness. If:
A)
B)
Both the solution of A and B require the same measure, namely to lift off the ignorance of the masses, instead of relying on an external system to decide things for us through lower emotions such as greed and fear of loss.
So I believe spirituality is the answer toward all the growing problems of humankind. If you want to read some provoking thoughts on spirituality, you can read an earlier post about the difference between spirituality and religion. Often, people confuse spirituality with the external traditions, symbols, mantras, leaders, etc of established religions or sects. This is not really spirituality, just the package around it. Spirituality is that which unites every path, every human being, both religious and atheist. It is the unchanging core, and not just the wrappings which are always changing with time. The core of a muslim is the same as the core of a christian and the core of an atheist, etc. I recommend reading this earlier post to see the difference between spirituality and religion.
I'm also convinced the "Economist Dream" is about to burst. Here is a post about the "Economist Dream" too. It is really a very appropriate post for this article.
The existance of the internet does not make the law change.
So the existance should change to fit the laws, and not the opposite? Sounds like a backwards path to become obsolete to me..
You got the point! ;-)
Either you come up with constructive critisism, or you're moaning. If you're moaning, you're not contributing and you can just as likely shut up. In fact, by moaning you are pulling the project down..
Neither Microsoft or the OSS community is helped with: This interface sucks! The people who made this are losers.
What helps is: This button can be named "Ok" according to standard Window-management pratices, so as to avoid confusion over what it really does (save the work and close the dialog). The navigation list can with advantage display the items in a hierarchical manner. etc..etc..
Instead of saying: This shit just doesn't work! (You can say it when home alone, but it just doesn't help when you yell it across the globe..)
This helps: I have a Megablaster nVidia 256MB card with 1 S-Video output blablabla. The arts-daemon fails to recognize it at start-up giving an error-message: etc...etc..
Searching on the internet and special forums for clues helps.
Even being polite and not expecting anyone to do free work for you, helps alot.
I hear Automatix is pretty good for settings things up on Ubuntu Just Right (tm): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=66563
Since I'm running mostly KDE-applications and didn't hear of it before too late, I didn't use this. So I've followed the various HOWTOs for installing proprietary codecs and compiled kmplayer (which is The best player for Linux right now, do yourself a big favour and forget all others), installed Real Player for Linux (found a utility that converted the install-binary into a deb IIRC). My Linux box now plays more formats than my Windows-boxes (mainly because I don't really care about all those formats, it was just so that people would not complain about it).
To compile kmplayer was just an 'apt-get install libkde-dev' (or whatever the KDE-dev package was called) and then 'make && make install'. There are some breezy deb's around, and I made some myself (I like to have everything a deb), but the links didn't work unfortunately.
For the future, the Penguin Liberation Front for Ubuntu is aiming to provide packages not provided in the free / universe / multiverse repositories: http://wiki.ubuntu-fr.org/doc/plf
They didn't have too many packages last time, but enough to put them in sources.list. I will submit my kmplayer deb's to the proper maintainers now that my box is properly set up.
For the simplest installation, I would recommend Automatix though. I've heard alot of good about it, and messing around with all of that yourself takes alot of time and frustration. I mainly see computers as a tool to relieve me of work, but I also like that tool as good as it can be, so I put up with it.
In a civilized society, it's everybody's business to educate and raise the children.
The parents have a lot of influence, and I fully agree they have the main responsibility over their children. However to lay the total burden on the parents, is simply insane. Anyone can easily come up with excuses. That's the easy cop-out, which helps nobody. How many hours are parents and children together these days?
The children will meet many people in their young years. The time spent with these people will be more than with their parents. These involve:
Relatives
Babysitters
Teachers
Peers
Trainers
Shop owners
Bus drivers
Any random person
The more people neglecting and behaving like robots, as is very common in the big cities, the more alienated teens you will get. It's very nice to behave like a human, and treat others like humans even if you're probably never going to see them again too.
Treat people (children / teens are certainly no exception!) like crap, then don't expect anything else than crap back. It has always been that you get more crap from teens than anyone else, but that's part of their nature. That's why we're the adults to see them through a difficult period and love them for who they are anyways.
Oh Give me a break! Those powers are easily twarted by the olufant, and everybody knows it.
I'd draw an olufant over the figer any day!
Sure, blame the programmer. In the meanwhile, the systems that run MySQL will continue to silently fail due to bugs, and distrupt your data, while those who run better database systems will catch the bug and fix it at an earlier stage.
If this is true that is. I saw something in vTigerCRM where if I store a long website URL into an account, it will just become shortened without any warning. So I'm inclined to believe this is true. That is *Very*, *Very*, *Seriously* foobar, IMHO.
A base Ubuntu-install is based entirely on Free Software (http://www.gnu.org./ As with Debian, you can add non-free sources yourself, for gettings codecs for Windows Media Player etc.
Suse has some parts Free and other parts proprietary, so it is not entirely Free Software. But you can download Suse free of charge (a more concise phrase).
I believe this is the main difference. Whenever you see the word "Free" or "free", you should always have the broader definition of Free in mind to see what fits.
Google is a publicly traded company. They by law has to keep shareholders interests (if they are legal). There is a difference between being ethical and being legal. When they say DO NO EVIL it may mean do legal things. They have never said we follow some ethics as dicatated by some religion or some community. As long as they do legal things there is no need for them to be afraid of anything.
Following the law has absolutely nothing to do with being good or evil.
Of course, good and evil are entirely subjective experiences. Already, there are people claiming that Google is evil since they have been cut off from the search engine. This is mostly Google-bombers making money on selling PageRanks to people. So who is evil and not really shows that it IS subjective, as stated.
Basically, it seems the "good" people are always those you fear or those who are "on the other side". This goes for both sides!
Are we intelligent beings? Sometimes, we get caught up in fear and dualism, which is ignorance. Other times, we are more clear. Intelligence is an ability to rise above that. While being attached, your opinions and actions are less objective to the reality.
Recognizing this, can free you from it. While denying it lets you sink deeper in the quagmire, while trying to convince everybody you're okay. You're really trying to convince yourself while sinking!
I for one, do not believe in good and evil. Rather, I recognize good and ignorance. You will often find that "evilness" and ignorance, is tightly bound. This is because the mind of such people is caught up, they are unable to think clearly. However, nobody is evil: Their mind can change at any time! Do you never change your mind?
As for the law: The tyrrants of the past and present, are they good then, because they dictate the law?
Sometimes, you even have to break the law to do something good for others!
Again, the law has absolutely nothing to do with it, and I believe Google is aware of this. I also believe they really wanted to have this slogan: To be good, if they had the balls for it. "To not be evil", really doesn't say much other than put you at more risk of becoming evil..
Fear in life is like salt in the food.
Too much and it will make the food inedible.
Too little will make the food bland and tasteless.
The trick is not to be paralyzed from fear, but use it for good. To stay alive and avoid situations which are clearly not in the best interest of the people involved, securing your child, etc.
There is nothing wrong with fear, on the contrary, if you feel fear, then you're still alive. How about that!
If you still haven't tied yourself into Access proprietary formats, language and practices (we told you so it would be a bad idea), you can tie yourself now to KDE and Rekall: http://www.rekallrevealed.org/
;-)
Bonus-points for those who manage to tie themselves up in this _and_ MS Access or some other obscure format without having a path of migration ready.
You might be interested in 'Rekall'. It is very much like Access, made by the KDE-team and commercially supported. You can make forms, reports and it works off a real MySQL or other ODBC-database.
I would've used Rekall if my requirements wasn't met in vTigerCRM, another excellent and commercially-backed OSS/Free Software.
And yes, unlike Kexi, GNU enterprise and lots of other projects, Rekall is actually mature (well, seems like it, I haven't run anything complex on it). The only downer is its lack of Web-interface, but there is something called Rekallweb showing that it is doable and maybe it will be done in a few years.
The term of a century for copyright law is chosen more or less just to correspond to the artist's lifetime.
i es'_copyright_length">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /List_of_countries'_copyright_length
That may well have been the intention from the start, but the length is now a lifetime PLUS 70 years: a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countr
There is now dispute wether current copyright will ever expire, since the media companies like Disney seem to extend the period when the next deadline is coming up.. The company then manage to rip off every folklore and everything in the public domain they can get their hands on, but never give anything back to the public domain, as was the entire intention behind both copyright and patent-laws..
Patent law is limited to about 20 years, that being the time it's considered "fair" to let you dominate the market for your invention. After that, the generics come, and you better have moved on to something new.
20 years to stifle the market. 20 years of software is ancient news. What software are you using that is 20 years old, except the RSA-algorithm, which was indeed patented..
I'm not cynical, but you need to present the correct facts.
It's all okay then! We should just become cynical and accept this FUD as "business as usual".
Not me. I'm in here for the long haul..
I will rather go down fighting than give up and let others run the show.