RMS lifestyle
stallman.org
stallman.org
This reminds me of a story my friend told me. Back in the early 90's(?) my friend had his lunch eaten by RMS, several times. I don't think it was malicious--it was more like if RMS was hungry, would just be happy that someone was kind enough to leave him something to eat in the AI lab fridge.
It was kind of considered an honor--after all, what were you going to do, complain, get him angry, and delay the release of Hurd?
Anyway, one can buy a throwaway cell phone in cash, and power it down when not in use, I thought. Like drug dealers do.
Still surveillable, but no more than any borrowed phone.
you can not do it in many countries like Spain where you have to provide your ID (because of terrorism).
I politely told them that the only reason I was in their shop was because it was an emergency, and I hoped that they enjoyed their future career packing boxes for internet retail, at least until they were replaced by robots. Harsh, but I never said I was a nice person.
No, apparently you're a dick.
Last phone I bought was paid for in cash, no questions asked. It wasn't from one of the large phone retailers, but not from anywhere dodgy, either [edit: it was from the Internet café here http://goo.gl/maps/DkMa2].
The SIM card was also purchased in cash from a newsagent without having to provide any identifying details.
I wasn't even going out of my way to avoid being traced - like you, I just needed a phone in an emergency, as my screen had broken on the old one.
> Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery;
Someone like RMS would be comfortable pulling out a battery, I expect.
If someone doesn't like him asking for a phone or lunch or whatever, then I assume it would be up to that someone to reject his request. It's not like Stallman goes around grabbing people's phones or lunches without asking first.
BTW, on second reading, the lunch story came off harsher in my telling than I intended--it was really supposed to be a story of one of his cute eccentricities--"this dude doesn't think like your average person". Which is probably why he's able to contribute so much more to society than the average person. I would totally make lunch for RMS every day, given the opportunity. If he would only tell us what his favorite food was.
Lets say you believe killing someone is evil. Then would you think it is OK to ask some else to kill someone for you ?
There is a reason people may not object to Stallman's request. Whatever that reason is it helps promote the surveillence mechanism that Stallman believes to be cellphones.
This is nothing like asking someone to kill for you. Killing is always wrong. Trading your freedom for being tracked for the ability to make phone calls on the move is a personal decision. Now, he would probably prefer that people not have to make that decision; that phones ran all free software, with no locked hardware that you can't get access to, so you could control your own phone and determine when it did or didn't broadcast. But that doesn't make it wrong for someone else to make a different decision than he did.
Thats just don't make any sense. The fridge thing do, but after the first sentence in your comment I have a small distrust regarding if you are giving the whole context here. Maybe the fridge is used for shared purchases of drinks/food/snacks that everyone could take when needed. How did other people use the fridge, and what was the initial purpose when the fridge was bought?
Nope, that was not the argument.
> I have a small distrust
Ha. At best this is a friend-of-a-friend story from 20 years ago, posted on the internet. If there's any consequence to you trusting this story, I'd highly recommend against it.
I think it's interesting for that reason though, because it doesn't say as much about his actual lifestyle as it does what he thinks about other people. For instance:
> As a matter of principle, I refuse to own a tie.
Tells us more about an opinion he's made about other people. If he wanted to be more descriptive of his lifestyle, he could have said that he was aesthetically minimalist (or minimalist with accessories in general). Instead ties become a value judgement, and he sees tie-wearers as "victims" at best.
In fact, though many would describe him as minimalist in lifestyle if they had to sum it up in a sentence, he doesn't use the term. This piece is really exclusively opinions.
> When I wait for my baggage in an airport, I always do one of these two. And I notice the people around me, feeling anxious and getting nothing done. What a waste.
His reasoning in general here seems arbitrary and condescending. If I didn't know who we were reading about beforehand I'd gander they were prone to being capricious. I wonder if we should tell him that trains run non-free software, just like phones.
In general the biggest takeaway I got from this is that he seems to have a very negative view of almost all other people.
I wouldn't be surprised if he gets compensated with briefcases filled with bills...
He's not a "minimalist", he is a freedom activist. He believes ties impinge on freedom.
The passenger does not run the train software. The train owner can choose what kind of software they want to use. RMS's trains (of which he has none) do not run non-free software.
RMS has thought deeply through these issues for decades, you aren't going to discredit him with 5 minutes of snark.
> he seems to have a very negative view of almost all other people.
And yet he dedicates his life to improving theirs, even though he could easily accumulate a few million dollars and retire. I'll take enemies like him over friends to make an effort to personally attack strangers for having a principled lifestlye, any day.
But he has weird personal hygiene. Certainly that invalidates one or two of his moral/philosophical points!
/s
what an ideal nerd :)
OTOH, religion has been pondered well longer than RMS has been alive. RMS is not going to discredit the Church with 20 years of heresy.
But that's part of what makes his lifestyle his. I don't think you can have a lifestyle, much less live a life, without considering what you think about other people yourself. It's quite important, actually, because what you see in other people is a reflection of yourself. So, in effect, it tells us more about Stallman himself and Stallman's lifestyle than if he had just iterated some of his aesthetic preferences.
> Tells us more about an opinion he's made about other people.
This being HN, jokes have to be pointed out. So to you - This is a joke:
"The first time I visited Croatia, that country had a major PR campaign based on being the origin of the tie. ("Cravate" and "Croat" are related words.) You can imagine my distaste for this — therefore, I referred to that country as "Tieland" for a while."
Come on. It's funny, lighten up.
Someone once told me that they disliked tattoos because they didn't like the idea of getting branded like people in Auschwitz or cattle on the field.
Question one: Is that an opinion about tattoos, or about other people who wear tattoos? Should those people be offended?
Question two: What was intended by the person who said it?
While his strict insistence on accurate semantics, such as GNU+Linux versus Linux and "free software" vs "open source," seems annoying, pushy, and generally weird, he has valid reasons to back the insistence up.
What reasons do you have to back your criticism of him up?
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
The point you might be overlooking is that the GNU userland was established back in the 80s. Most UNIXes (there were many, and at least a dozen "common" ones) shipped with AT&T or custom or (later) BSD versions of these userland tools.
GNU was brilliant because it was portable to most of those pathologically differentiated UNIXes, and it meant that arguments and behaviors were predictable, after you installed the GNU tools.
Then along came Linux. Of course it used the GNU tools. Everyone used GNU tools. The different part was that the kernel was free and not BSD (which had recently emerged from serious political and licensing drama, and -- if the old story is to be believed -- Linus was completely unaware of).
Soon there were dozens of operating systems sharing that kernel. The important categorization of them is that they were all Linux. And yeah, they ran the GNU userland, like every other non-pathological UNIX that wasn't BSD. Any other choice would have been hugely surprising (and doomed Linux).
So yes, GNU deserves prominence. But "GNU" wasn't omitted from the common naming due to any hostility or ignorance. It was just obvious, and not new or noteworthy in that sense.
It hurt RMS's feelings, and he has been vocal about it. Everyone agrees that GNU deserves much respect, but many people are turned off by the way RMS has reacted to his feelings of disappointment.
It's not fair, but few things in life are, and many people have difficulty sympathizing with RMS.
So I really think that it is perfectly fine to name a system by it’s lowest possible encapsulated unit of software (kernel). In my case, this is Linux.
Interestingly enough, /g/ is obsessed with RMS and the regulars' attitude towards him is the epitome of a love-hate relationship. The sheer number of images they've produced featuring him is quite impressive.
After all, he's going to go down in history first and foremost as the founder of the modern open source movement, that's not a technical thing per se.
Ouch, rms wouldn't be pleased with that statement ;) "we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters" -- rms
ADDED: To my knowledge, there are two areas where he's really, truly, significantly innovated: EMACS and GNU/FSF. The EMACS innovations are just not the stuff of serious history, however much we appreciate them while we're using it. GNU/FSF, that's big, and while (more than) minimal technical merit was required for it make a difference, the innovation was not technical per se (well, unless you look at the legal side, i.e. the GPL). Again, I'm trying to see how "history" will view him.
I myself use FOSS when I'm talking to an audience that knows it, but many if not most general historians are unlikely to make such fine distinctions, unless we get some really major object lesson in why his version of free software is really what we should be doing.
E.g. imagine a major spying on citizens, or more likely subjects, scandal from opening microphones by closed (enough) software. I know some land line phone system designers have deliberately made that impossible.
(I do, BTW, empathize with his cellphone attitude, I own one candybar "3rd world" cellphone that's almost always turned off unless I'm rendezvousing/coordinating with someone and/or it's an emergency. Mostly because of lifestyle and penny pinching, but I never forget that whenever I turn it on I'm saying "here I am!" to the towers it connects to, and on or officially off, it's almost never in a place where eavesdropping would be useful. And, hmmm, yep, when I'm out it's almost always with my father, and I take advantage of his always carrying and primarily using a cellphone.
Hmmm, come to think of it, there are a number of reasons we got along with each other, despite me being an unhidden arch-conservative type and he a rather liberal type, e.g. neither of us are very trusting of the powers that be.)
I mean, sure, a lot of people who don't know a whole lot about him or haven't had to deal with him over the course of decades might have shallow knee-jerk opinions on him: they hate him, they love him, or they barely know who he is. But I suspect a lot of the anti-RMS sentiment that you might see on someplace like HN comes from a much deeper place than that.
I don't hate the guy, personally, and I do think that the good he's done has outweighed the bad. I also agree with him on quite a few fronts, to a degree. However, he has alienated a LOT of people over the years for no good reason other than his own personality issues and a seeming complete lack of a reflective nature or an innate sense of perspective or empathy.
I feel sorry for him more than anything else, because I think he's a deeply troubled guy who unfortunately ended up in a life path that sort of rewarded him for staying in his deeply troubled state. He's always had lots of admirers and supporters, not to mention grants and speaking gigs. As a result, he never had any external forces that might compel him to grow up beyond a certain point, intellectually or emotionally.
I think a lot of the more nuanced, deep, and well-fermented RMS hate you might see stems not so much from total disagreement, but rather disappointment from wasted potential. He's somebody who's had a lot of great ideas from which so many great things have sprouted, but he's a terrible steward for those ideas. He ends up making it about him somehow, or takes so many things to such ridiculous extremes, or justifies his ideas for all the wrong reasons, or intentionally alienates the people that he should be trying to build bridges to, that he ends up discrediting the kernels of brilliant truth that are at the heart of much of his philosophy.
So, there are a ton of people who at one time or another were inspired by RMS in their larval stages to value freedom and sharing and openness, but grew to see him as an impediment to those very ideals. I'm one of those people and I so wish that it didn't have to be this way. I don't think you're seeing people criticizing his views on ties, so much as you're seeing disillusionment at a much deeper level with RMS' personal and intellectual failings, which are pretty broadly on display even when he's writing about trivial things like ties or hobbies or cell phones.
I would suspect that for the majority of people, both the ones who hate and the ones who love him, barely know who he is.
I don't know him at all, but I would guess that if I did get to know him, I would find that he's just another human being - and being a human is often hard and weird, so we all cope differently.
I'd add a few more things, at least from the 70s/80s (I left the relevant social circle in the 90s when I left the Boston area):
A near complete lack of personal security and safety awareness and savvy, which wouldn't matter so much to others except:
No respect for others' relationships with SOs; the ham-handed way he'd hit on your girlfriend was mostly a bit annoying, best avoided by having your girlfriend's other SO on the other side of her and you both going into "alpha male don't fsck with us" physical projection mode ^_^ ... BUT: it put him and some fellow diners in jeopardy when he hit on a gangster's moll in the late night Boston Chinatown restaurant the circle frequented (as related to me by a reliable 1st hand witness).
It was said, albeit denied, that RMS took a technical disagreement with Dan Weinreb to the point of purging MIT-AI backup tapes, and this was why Dan left for LLL and the S-1 project. Now, as I note Dan denied this, but the very fact it was credible during the period Dan was absent tells you how abrasive he can be in technical matters.
Somewhat troubled, yes (it doesn't make my deeply troubled threshold, at worst we're talking the personality disorder level of mental illness and to my knowledge and observation it didn't rise to that level though the '80s), and note most of these observations are from before he became really famous.
(See my disclaimers here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804156)
Whatever the intent in submitting this to Hacker News was, it's turning into pointless bullying and should probably just be killed.
He has some clearly strange habits - I wouldn't call him extreme, radical or militant per se, but he obviously doesn't carry himself like most people.
I don't think the majority of us are trying to diminish his contributions to the internet community. Rather, we're commenting on how odd he is. That's okay, it's just humorous in a nutty way.
RMS takes the cynical beliefs people often think when they hear Christmas music and hate it, and takes it to actually doing it (to provide one example).
"Ugh, fuck the holidays. I hate always having to spend money on people I pretend to like."
^Most of us get over it. RMS has the anti-social (I don't mean that in a DSM or pejorative sense) solidarity to actually stop celebrating holidays. It's admirable, just weird.
> When I wait for my baggage in an airport, I always do one of these two. And I notice the people around me, feeling anxious and getting nothing done. What a waste.
Even with the benefit of the doubt that he didn't mean this as snarky( I do not know RMS personally, so I cannot judge too much), he imposes his lifestyle decisions (working all the time) as a sort of absolute truth.
>None of my shirts carry messages (such as words or symbols). That practice strikes me as lacking dignity, so I won't wear clothing with symbols, not even for causes I support. This is not a matter of ethical disapproval, so I don't mind selling hats and shirts with free software slogans on behalf of the FSF; but I choose not to wear them myself.
I get not wanting to have messages on your shirt. Loads of people are like that. But to simultaneously say that it lacks dignity but then act as if this isn't a value judgement is a bit contrarian.
I think this is more one of those things that are more annoying than somehow "fundamentally" wrong but the fact that he "doesn't mind" using other people's cell phones or rewards cards is reminiscent of a lot of annoying people I've known in my life.
Your personal preferences stop being immune from criticism when they end up imposing things on others.
But why compile a list of things that basically says, "I generally don't like people, the things most people do or have, or the silly rituals most people enjoy."
I can respect his opinions, but he comes across as very condescending...
That said, I do admire how much of a diehard he is about his beliefs. Not many people actually "walk the walk" when it comes to not owning a cell phone in today's age...
At this point, there are just too many contradictions, I'd rather forget and simply accept the absurd.
For example, being an atheist, I don't particularly believe in holidays myself. I do enjoy myself with my family even if it mean a few capitalists make a little more money during the season. On the whole, a meaningless event makes the whole world happy.
I'm of a fairly open religion (Hinduism). So, there aren't ardent rules you need to waste time with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism#cite_ref-Klostermaier_... [1]
If you assume it's a religion, try this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism (Ctrl/Cmd + F. "atheist")
By open I mean there is no rigid rule set or algorithm in my culture to obtain salvation or anything like that (going to temple is optional). You could simply say no. My parents didn't bother me after a while (My mum is an orthodox person). I do want to point out that being a "nasthik" (non-believer) is not encouraged, but ignored.
From Wikipedia: "Misanthropy is the general hatred, mistrust or disdain of the human species or human nature"
Nah, just a "difficult" person, at least based on our interactions in the '80s. He wasn't that bad a person to be around as long as you're not in one of his "bad" categories, i.e. there was a big change in our interactions where I started to work for "Software Hoarder" UniPress after previously working at e.g. Lisp Machine Inc.
"...However, I absolutely refuse to take Amtrak trains because they check passengers ID (sometimes, not all the time)."
Are these two statements contradictory, or is there something special about what Amtrak do that threatens privacy more than the disclosure of identity to an airline? This is a genuine question, I have never visited the US.
(In the UK, you can still walk into a railway station and buy a ticket for cash without showing ID anywhere within the mainland. You will not be asked for anything other than the ticket on the train unless you are using a Student or Senior Citizen's railcard to claim the discount.)
The more I think about the nature of software, the more I find Stallman's views about software freedom compelling.
Anyway, it casts light on the apparent contradiction simply because life is made of trade-offs. The choice to prefer (say) Greyhound (or a personal vehicle) to Amtrak is a wholly different thing than the choice to visit or not visit (say) Indonesia. The same concern may merit the former but not the latter.
"I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up."
I really want to know what horrific experience RMS had with breakfast in the past such that you can't even mention it to him!!
Also the type of food. If you sleep in on a Saturday until noon, you'll probably tend to want breakfast food when you first wake up.
The time of day is far behind those two factors for what constitutes breakfast in popular usage.
It's 9am on a Saturday here and I just ate two slices of cold pizza. Not everyone desires "breakfast food" first thing in the moring. :)
Even Wikipedia doesn't have a strict definition. I propose a standards committee meet to disambiguate this once and for all.
For example:
"However, there is an absurd social pressure on men to wear ties. They do this as a form of sucking up to the boss."
Perhaps they just like the way they look in tie?
-------------------------------------------------
Edited to add more context to quote.
If you'd been in those circles in the '80s, you clearly would have been viewed as eccentric as RMS for being a "frequent tie wearer", but all else being equal, we would have loved you as much as we loved him ^_^.
Time to rename the site to "Hater News".
I admire the man for being willing to do that. Best way to learn a language is to actually use it. I'd say it'd require courage, but I don't know if courage is a quantity in RMS, he seems to just do what he wants.
I am not aware of how bad his French was at the time though. I guess majorly inconveniencing those around him is not as important to him (something that seems to be recurring in these sorts of discussions about RMS).
> I don't say you shouldn't read these books. That I leave to the author. I only urge you not to pay for them.
Quite the upstanding citizen.
His justification for this is even more bizarre, he accuses JK Rowling of something hypothetical:
> Suppose that the mistakenly sold Harry Potter books had been ebooks: then instead of ordering her fans not to read her books, Rowling could have ordered them erased.
and then demanding she apologizes for something she never did:
> I think we should forgive Rowling (or her publisher) when she (or it) > Recognizes that this injunction was wrong. > Promises not to do anything like it again.
Quite the upstanding citizen.
What's your issue with it? Is it wrong to read without paying for it, now? Personally, I like libraries.
In the very next sentence, Stallman suggests that you borrow one from someone, and in the sentence after that that you use a public library. I think your out-of-context quote is a dishonest attempt to portray Stallman as suggesting something he did not. Dishonest, childish, and thoroughly contemptible. I'm not a Stallman fan by any means [0], but I doubt he would stoop to this level of dishonesty to attempt to discredit anyone.
The rest of your comment is also wrong and confused, but I can't tell if it's also from dishonesty or simply stupidity. (If I must: he is suggesting an apology would be appropriate for a real injunction that her lawyers actually got, not for "something she never did". For example.)
If a friend of yours starts showing such behavior, you will quickly cut them off and think they are jerks. And rightfully so.
I refuse to have a cell phone because they are tracking and
surveillance devices. They all enable the phone system to
record where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be
remotely converted into listening devices.
I don't know if that's what he meant by 'listening devices'. In any way, a lot of these statements make a lot of sense for many citizens in different parts of the world (China etc), where there's a corrupt government and a suppressed freedom of speech. For an US citizen I suppose they may be exaggerated. But I share many of his views, and he obviously deserves a lot more respect than some people show towards him.
EDIT. And of course, if it's running non-free software the cell phone can easily be made to transmit microphone data without the user noticing.
Most phones can be remotely updated with software by the carrier, and the GSM protocol allows for remote update of the firmware.
Through I suspect there are much easier methods, such as attacking the software stack itself like: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot12/woot12...
As an aside, when I was porting Linux to the Motorola Q I realized I could easily turn off the display and key backlight and turn on the microphone and camera though the sysfs,this would appear to anyone as if the phone was off but I could remotely control it (SSH tunnel) and capture audio and video. The only problem would be the heat, but someone would likely assume it was used for a while before powering it off. This without any low-level firmware change, just booting GNU/linux ;) from HaRET.
I think a clever surveillance agency with inside access to the guts of the phone could make it very, very hard to detect.
The question is can they do it to everyone frequently, including the handful of super-nerds out there who love tracing every operation their devices do and can be certain they don't have some sort of malware? While I don't see the capability as technologically infeasible, I do think it would be noticed sooner or later if it was always-on.
If such a feature does exist, then it would have to be used sparingly on targeted individuals, and even then if it was used to incriminate them such evidence would have to come up in court (unless they all get the s/Gitmo/secret prison/ treatment, a big assumption!) and then the world would know such features exist. Presently I think traditional manners of evidence-gathering are probably sufficient and people publicly leak all sorts of data (or have a lot of data logged that can be subpena'd) -- plus every now and again we hear about some nerd (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5194489) reporting they have been bugged. Some people think the CPUs of Intel et al. have backdoors in them, but if so, there'd be no need to bug computers.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence... so I don't really take the government backdoors in everything by default too seriously. I'd need some sort of evidence showing their existence to change my mind.
Here you go, seems pretty well sourced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_listening_device#Remotel...
The problem boils down to this: baseband (the chip doing the GSM, LTE, .. communication) processors are completely propietary. There is no source for the software running on them, it's a big binary blob. And the other big problem is that baseband processors have become a hub for any analog processing. They run the GPS chip and they are the DSP for the microphones. Combine access to all vital systems and the primary communication link, and business practices in the big, sometimes partially government owned, companies producing the software for these chips.. it makes for an explosive mixture in a "mobile first" world.
Recommended talks: http://vimeo.com/25806106 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1lYU0VMCoY
Nowadays if FedGov wanted to do it, it would implant malware.
Thank goodness for that.
It is sad to see the "tieless" generation of beards and freedom slowly fading and having not found understanding in our time of rockstars and ninjas.
I wonder if he tries to be different so he can be different and unique, and that all his bluster and quirks come from this desire for uniqueness rather than his fight for "freedom."
Or he just have it in his hand as someone else is carrying a ball cap on his head. The real question is if it takes away the fun of watching MIT do the Soulja Boy dance.
He seems to hold very strong opinions about certain things, but it appears (at least to me) that not a lot of thought went into forming these. Some are just arbitrary ("Not all my shirts are red or purple, but many are. I like those colors.") and some are just wrong ("I am an Atheist, for scientific reasons").
He's a very interesting fellow though (obviously a genius in his work) and has contributed a lot to the free software movement. It's nice to see what he's up to lately.
[gonvaled replied to me below; and my reply here]
I'm not commenting on his belief (or lack thereof), simply from whence it came. I make that comment regardless of the fact that I am either a theist or an atheist. My research consists of developing QFT/QM numerically for simulation, so I can say there is no law of nature that supports his statement that atheism stems from any scientific reason. Dirac's equation? Nope. Creation-annihilation operators? Nope. Did I miss an equation somewhere? Science explains how nature works and provides predictive capacity; that's it. Do you disagree with that?
Furthermore, I didn't list any criticism of Richard (as I have none); in fact I gave him two compliments: "genius" and "he's interesting and I like following what he's up to".
when people talk about scientific reasoning, I assume it also includes the scientific method. As such, atheist and it tend to agree that any prevailing theory should be abandon as soon as a better theory is suggested. This however is strictly contrary to faith, in that faith is the constant belief no matter what other theories exist. (also see The God Delusion for an expanded version, and other arguments of scientific reasoning and atheism.)
Most religions offer plenty. In the Bible for example, age and creation of the world, the great flood, praying can cure you, God punishes bad people, etc. The claims that have been falsified are nowadays interpreted as "metaphorical" stories.
†As in deus ex machina.
Sorry to disappoint you, but you are probably an atheist. An atheist does not believe that god does not exist: an atheist does not believe, period. An atheist recognizes that reason can not answer that question. That the question "does this invisible, untouchable thing exist?" has no meaning whatsoever.
The only difference between an atheist and an agnostic, is that the latter is utterly concerned with the impossibility to prove the existence/non existence of god. An atheist accepts that fact as self-evident, and goes on with his life.
You are right that atheism does not stem from science (atheism predates the scientific method by some millennium). But the scientific method reinforces the atheist point of view.
That's besides Occam's razor and "the stage is too big for the drama" and all the other science inspired reasons not to believe.
People wear ties for a lot of reasons. They can make you feel more confident, you might like the aesthetics, or you might want to impress (which is the reason RMS gave for not liking them), you might wear them out of respect (a funeral, for instance).
This is sad. Stallman is one of my favorite people (among people I've never met), and everyone deserves a family of some sort. Not necessarily kids, but simply a small group of people who he loves, who love him back, and who would spend his free time with him.
Without going into the personal details, based on my interactions with him in the '80s I'd say that's not going to happen, especially since he's old enough it's unlikely he'll "mellow out" until possibly when he gets a lot older.
Maybe, someday, but that's not the way to bet.
[citation needed]
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_tracking
There, sources for you, through a indirect layer that is Wikipedia. The actually sources are at the bottom under "References".
Source: http://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
Maybe because he's just interested in the textual content.
It just seems like an odd, circuitous route to take. I would have expected him to just use Lynx or something.
>Indian classical music (I tend to enjoy Carnatic more than Hindustani)
what
1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society
1990: Exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship ("genius grant")
1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)."
1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology
1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award
1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award
2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being (武田研究奨励賞)
2001: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow
2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership
2003: Honorary doctorate, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
2004: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Nacional de Salta.
2004: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú.
2007: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.
2007: First Premio Internacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre
2007: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote.
2007: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Pavia
2008: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru
2009: Honorary doctorate, from Lakehead University
2011: Honorary doctorate, from National University of Córdoba.
2012: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad César Vallejo de Trujillo, in Peru
2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Latinoamericana Cima de Tacna, in Peru
2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad José Faustino Sanchez Carrió, in Peru.
Source: Wikipedia
But here on Hacker News (of all places), let's instead criticize his personal preferences on fucking ties.
The rest is all gunk -- it's basically his equivalent of his Facebook friends list.
BTW, he uses more text to describe his taste in music.
"The people who wear ties under these circumstances are victim-coperpetrators: each one who cedes to this pressure and wears a tie increases the pressure on others. This is a central concept for understanding other forms of propagating nastiness, including nonfree software and Facebook. In fact, it was in regard to ties that I first recognized this phenomenon.
I don't condemn victim-coperpetrators, since they are primarily victims and only secondarily perpetrators. But I believe I should not be one of them. I hope my refusal to wear a tie will make it easier for others to refuse as well."
I don't really see wearing or not wearing ties as some kind of moral imperative.
His music preferences are described with 2076 characters, while ties uses 1838.
You could state that ties is the singular item under a bullet point list with most text. However then we are either saying that music isn't "a singular item", or that in a compositional sense, RMS hasn't spaced the tie text with bullet points where for music he do.
> But here on Hacker News (of all places), let's instead criticize his personal preferences on fucking ties.
So someone writes about their personal life, and then people discuss it. What the heck does a whole bunch of honorary doctorates from Latin America have to do with this? Obviously the people in Latin America like him.
As far as I'm concerned, a single actual doctorate is worth more than all of that, or say an equivalent feat like writing gcc, emacs, gdb, and the GPL (iirc). But nevertheless, even those significant accomplishments don't make his personal opinions sacred to the point of inoculating them against possible counterpoints.
Guy states a bunch of preferences on internet, preferences are now up for discussion. End of. I thought it was an interesting read.
From what I've seen, it generally seems like intense criticism on HN is directed at attention seekers irrespective of their celebrity. I don't find this to be a particularly attention seeking post, but nevertheless RMS has engaged in a fair amount of attention seeking behavior in the past.
At any rate, the views being most criticized are actually critical of others anyway, including the one about ties.
Guy Steele provided the start of the first (in that there were 3 or so visual TECO systems, each with its own key bindings etc., and he got enough people to agree on one), and RMS took off with it and made it into much of what makes EMACS good (minus normal users writing code, since that version was in TECO). I'm sure he contributed to the the Lisp Machine's EMACS, but Dan Weinreb was the major author of its two initial versions (EINE Is Not EMACS, ZWEI Was Eine Initially).
The current EMACS we use was written by an obscure guy at CMI who included a bytecode compiler in it, you might have heard of him, James Gosling ^_^. RMS illicitly started with a copy of this, the rights holders, UniPress, which ran as much as possible then on the "gated community open source" business model, including EMACS, were savvy enough not to try to do anything about this (heck, even in the face of some pretty vicious stuff from RMS, up to and including an face to face accusation that they set his house on fire (it was a couple of kids with matches and ... kerosene as I recall); we did name our Laserprinter "Software Hoarder" :-).
Don't know about gdb, but he does to my knowledge get full credit for starting gcc, the GNU project and of course the GPL, essentially the modern FOSS movement, and it's hard to overstate the value of that.
Disclaimers: acquaintance/sort of friends for a while ... until I went to work for UniPress, I worked for Lisp Machines Inc. (LMI) at a time when he was pretty much the only guy working on the MIT/LMI fork and keeping it fairly close to feature complete with Symbolics, and we were roommates for a few months in the latter part of 1983, starting a bit before the launch of the GNU Project, in that (half of a) house that later was torched.
This doesn't seems like a fair characterization of what happened. GNU Emacs was never something one could consider "written by Gosling."
GNU Emacs did start out with bits of Gosling Emacs in it, in particular the redisplay and buffer-management code (which were tricky to get right), but Gosling Emacs and GNU Emacs were always very different programs, internally as well as in their UI. In particular, of course, GNU Emacs had a real full-fat lisp interpreter whereas Gosling Emacs used a rather weird language with a vaguely lisp-like syntax called Mocklisp. GNU Emacs was influenced a lot by Gosling Emacs in other ways, of course, e.g. the use of real buffers to display completions instead of an ephemeral completion display like the original EMACS.
Up until that time, Gosling Emacs had been widely used and freely shared at CMU (where Gosling was a grad student), and RMS thought he had a verbal agreement with Gosling to use those parts he did. However Gosling then sold it to Unipress, and Unipress didn't agree... It's not clear exactly what Gosling really said to RMS, but my interpretation is that he didn't care so much about such issues and probably just said "yeah, yeah, sure" when RMS asked—after all, everybody else was using Gosmacs in source form—but of course a commercial company did care about such issues, and took a much more hardline stance.
So, RMS had to rewrite the parts he got from Gosling Emacs.
I suspect the end effect of all this could be described as positive though, because it made very clear the importance of paying attention to the legal details as well as the technical ones.
By the time this was playing out, I was intimately familiar with the C base of (UniPress) Gosling EMACS, from having finished a MS-DOS port and was working on an Amiga port. So it was no trouble to look at GNU EMACS to determine it was, in the the legal, copyright sense, a derivative work, not something that was influenced by it, which is not something that RMS/GNU were even claiming at the time.
They said, based on an email they claimed to have received (that as I recall they never produced, but as you note all this hardly matters), that they were authorized to start with an old version of Gosling EMACS, and they claimed they fixed this legally by rewriting every part of it they got from Gosling EMACS ... which doesn't cut it, legally. If UniPress had been run by junkyard dogs they could have done an USL v. BSDi and put the GNU under a legal cloud, except they probably would have won. It was an unconscionable risk for RMS to take.
Fortunately, all they did was verbally disagree, they thought GNU EMACS would create a bigger market for Gosling EMACS, which I'm sure was true for a while (the version GNU started with was ancient and missing a lot of polish), and that no one would win if they took it to the courts. It probably helped that they'd previously worked at Plauger's Whitesmiths and the separation was as ugly as you can imagine, although the legal drama was cut short when the other side's lawyer was caught burglarizing their office, which doesn't tend to impress judges....
Note the other comments in this discussion about how RMS isn't a good steward of many of the efforts under his control, and I'd add specifically "look at how GCC died and was replaced by a community version", the Lucid Emacs/XEmacs mess (in the link that points out RMS can't sing), and Hurd's beyond Duke Nukem Forever path.
[I also spent tons of time looking at the source code for both versions at the time, and both the similarities and differences were pretty clear.]
Without reviewing my Finseth, what is there besides buffer management and its linked redisplay, built in commands (a lot of which were copied, like my favorite marker of backup-by-copying-while-linked, which in the '80s was to my fairly extensive knowledge unique to Gosling EMACS), keymappings and the extension language? (Half my professional work in the '80s was on many different versions of EMACS, and I believe I worked on every significant UNIX one, although only Steve Zimmerman's CCA Emacs was a real competitor to Gosling/GNU EMACS as machines got enough memory. Note when I say "worked on" I might mean nothing more than porting; today's young whippersnappers are spoiled by the Linux mono-culture and/or modern package systems :-)
You say the first two "were tricky to get right" ... you've got that right, back in those days when resources were dear and performance was critical (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping :-), they were in my opinion the hardest parts, especially since the superiority of the buffer gap vs. linked lines wasn't necessarily intuitive, and didn't the main file of the Gosling redisplay code have a skull and crossbones at the top? Although I'll admit to some bias since buffer management on the PDP-11 and non-VM PCs and 68000 workstations was problematic, in this case especially for a code base that started on a paging super-minicomputer (the VAX). Once you had those, building on top of them is fairly obvious, and a if not the largest part of the quality was a matter of taste, where RMS was vastly superior to Gosling, from using "standard" keymappings to a real LISP.
You can admire and benefit from Stallman's work and achievements, without necessarily agreeing with all of his positions.
And if someone essentially judges you morally deficient for as much as using a cellphone or MS Windows, it's kind of open season to judge him on superficial things like his choice of ties or personal habits, in return.
No. It's really not.
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...
Thats completely true, its also completely juvenile and unnecessary.
RMS is a controversial figure, but I dont think this debate over something as (by comparison) trivial as "What madonna requires backstage before a concert", has any productive value.
You can justify your own judgements of him based on what you perceive his value judgements of others to be all you want.
At least he's willing to be honest about who he is.
20-30 years of baggage or not, leave the guy be and go do something to make the world a better place.
Edit 2: Honest question, how can I delete my account on HN? I've come to realize (sadly) how many hours I've wasted on this bullshit. PG, please ban this account.
Now, pipe down and let the adults speak.
You can't. You'll probably get hellbanned though. Personally, I don't think two wrongs make a right, and you should be able to delete your account if you want. Maybe just close the tab and never come back. That always works.
In your profile settings, you will find two boxes marked "maxvisit" and "minaway". If you set those to a small value (like 1) and a large value (like say 602430), and then ALSO set "noprocrast" to "yes", you'll basically be unable to use your account.
Seeing you dying to leave HN proves to me in a very pleasing way that HN often just plain works.
Or a hipster, if you prefer.
"Dude, check out this awesome new Death Metal band I found!"
"Dude, that's not Death, that's lame melo-death."
"Nah dude, this is ambient drone death!"
"There's no such thing as ambient drone death."
"There totally is, haven't you heard of $FOO?" (where $FOO is some random Finnish band that recorded one EP in a shack in some guy's backyard, using gear that nobody has ever heard of, musicians that nobody has ever heard of, a producer nobody has ever heard of, and only release the album as ogg vorbis files transferred onto 8-track tapes)
(Some other guy comes along) "Oh, that band... no, they're not ambient drone death, they're avant garde post-moral melo-death-core"
(Yet another guy comes along) "That's not avant garde post-moral melo-death-core, it's avant garde drone viking noise metal."
(everybody sane) "Aaargggghhhhh"
("that guy") "Yeah, they're totally tr00 kvlt, dudes. Let's go sacrifice a goat."
I'm sure devout fans of Trance, Country, Jazz, Classical and all sorts of other kinds of music likewise get into some pretty esoteric knowledge, when viewed from outside their sphere.
Also, he is 60 years old, so developing such a broad taste of music is not even a huge effort!
Thats not _that_ unusual.
Also, folk music is not esoteric.