1,478 karma · joined October 30, 2008
BSD and MIT licenses are Open Source but not Free, they are more concerned with providing a claim of ownership to the author than with the freedom of the user.
LGPL is a backdoor to let Free Software interact with non Free Software, which is a good thing too. If your product uses Free Libraries, no big deal, the more the merrier. But you cannot claim it is also Free y proxy.
https://policies.google.com/terms
https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.htm...
Maybe there's some code that at one point was FOSS in those products, but the products themselves are nor Free.
IMHO a code base that has been forked from a FOSS project cannot be considered FOSS itself even if they keep retrofitting changes back to the original, because you cannot know what is there in the proprietary part. This is specially true if you distribute the derivative product only in binary form.
If school administration were to save money using subsidized Chromebooks, they could save even more money by stubbornly remaining in the paper age. Teachers would be happier too, and students would at the very least be not worse off; I am even willing to say that they would be forced to learn analog skills that are desperately needed nowadays.
In short, I do not buy that it is lack of options that force schools to buy those products. It is the evil wizardry called "Marketing" that bewitch school administrators and prevent them to see the options in front of their noses.
The part everybody is missing is "I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England", which provides the context to understand the stuff people is having a meltdown about. This is not "heads on pikes" by a bunch of salvages; it is "heads on pikes" as part of the official policy of an absolutist State.
The way I read it, Bannon said: "I would have them face the death penalty, if there was a legal way to do so. And I would use their cases as deterrence from other would be traitors."
I don't see it as a call to have civilian supporters attempting against the lives of those two high ranking officials; but could be interpreted as a declaration of intent to pursue and extend draconian powers for the (Executive Branch of the) US Government. I will let you decide which of the two interpretation is gravest.
So, if you run into a "miracle doctor" that will charge you $1,000,000 per dose of their "miracle medicine" that "wipes away cancer, like, forever", the reasons why your claim will be denied are already stated clearly in the small print of your contract.
If you have power fantasies, may I interest you in the practice of martial arts instead? I know I am biased in favor of that, but I will try anyways.
If you want to learn and make others do your bidding, the first step is to learn how to do your own bidding: "cannot command until can do" and all that. It is very satisfying to be able to decide to do something and then just do it. Most people cannot do that. Most people do not realize they devote precious little of their time to do what they want to do, because they keep just running in the hamster wheel until they grow old and die.
What is it so special about the minions? Do they have to be robots? What is it with the Moon? Answer those questions and you will figure out what is your new dream... or reframe the older one
You give too much credit to police states.
What happens in reality is that criminals with connections and a minimum of self restrain are folded into the "dark side" of the State, while their rivals are cracked down hard. In this way, a number of low-impact, high-revenue illegal activities are tolerated (in exchange of bribes), crime syndicates are expected to self police and not break whatever taboos were imposed from above; and then this "dark side" of the government do put a lid on top of the deviant side of society, diverting their energies into activities that do not challenge the status quo.
Does it make for a safer place to live for the common citizen? Maybe. While it may be less likely that you will be injured in an armed robbery, you will also be more likely to get your money swindled by this scheme or another... and you will have less chance of redress when this happens.
If I were writing an utopia, class action lawsuits would rain like fire and brimstone.
The fact that you found the article to be useful simply means that you are part of their target audience, which is great. Just keep in mind that the same advice will not work as well when you communicate with a different audience
From Greer's point of view, the factors that make today's hardware brittle are not technical, but economic. Corporations have to make electronics at a profit, and at a price point that is accesible to the average working class citizen. This business model would not be sustainable in the either a fast-collapse or slow-collapse scenario.
Instead, in the novel, governments take over the tech industry sometime in the second half of the 21st century, and treat it as a strategic resource in its struggle to not be left out in the global musical chairs game of climate change + resource depletion. They run it at a loss, and put the best minds they can spare to the task of making a computing infrastructure that is built to last.
By the 25th century, which is the time when the novel's events take place, Humanity has lost the ability to manufacture electronics, but computers built 350 years ago are kept in working order by a cadre of highly trained specialists (most of which have the skills of a geeksquad employee, but still). Common people have maybe heard some wildly innacurate legend about robots or computers. Wealty individuals are probably better informed but still cannot own one of those at any price. They only computers depicted of spoken about are US government property operated at US millitary facilities (or maybe there was one at the Library of Congress, do not really recall, though).
There's one post-collapse hacker in the novel, a secondary character that is part of the protagonist's crew. The author is not an engineering type and dances around the actual skills of this guy, but I'd say he seems able to use a debugger/hex editor and read binaries. His greatest achievement, though, is to fix and set up an ancient printer and recover documents from a disk that was "erased" but not wiped clean.
C is a bit like a Formula One car. Regardless of the historic reasons that caused it to evolve the way it did, it ended up occupying a niche and being very well suited to it, while at the same time being ill suited for other, more general purpose, uses. Under that perspective, change is slow because the people most invested in it want to make improvement happen in a very narrow and precise direction. McLaren, after all, is not going to bat an eye if you complain about its latest model lacking a baby seat!!!
C++, on the other hand, started sort of like NASCAR racing. It wanted to make a racing car out of a mundane, everyday car, and it got very, very good at it. Unfortunatelly, because C++ is based in an everyday car, and because it is Designed-by-Committee (TM), it shows lots and lots of "improvements" that individually kind of make sense, but in the bulk lack any coherence. Nowadays, C++ may perform like the Batmobile (from "Batman Begins" movie) on a good day; but you never know when it is going to bite you in the ass and turn into the Homermobile from the 90's Simpson's TV show.
It is a mix of necessity and lack of insight that many of the people in my generation had to learn how to drive in fucking racing carts!!! But when it's all said and done it gives you a little perspective on how things work and helps you appreciate the differences.
Second, you assume there's one canonical Hamlet.txt to compare against (which there's, if Alice was dumb enough to pick whatever is the first available option in Guthenberg.org as her cover message). For a more sophisticated attack, you must consider how many different editions, reprints, etc, have there been of that work over the centuries. For each of those, you must consider how many possible digitalizations can be obtained for different brands and configurations of scanners.
Then, there's the issue that you must do all of this for every large message that Internet users send to each other...
On the other hand, I would fully support a law that would give a temporary suspension on people's driving licenses if there was a reliable way to tell that they have an habit of cutting other drivers off. And to make it a permanent ban on operating any kind of vehicle if you were a reincident. Again, it would be greatly inconvenient for them, but there must be some point when the rights of the public superseed the rights of individual assholes.
Can? Sure! Would?
Security is one of those things that most people say they care about, but they are really not willing to pay for. Big companies have resources, but they are also in the business of making money, so they will put most of those resources to work on features that produce a ROI. Security is a huge cost center, and even when taken seriously it will be pursued only to the degree that it addresses/mitigates risks enough to conduct business.
It is not just the possibility that "very dirty stuff" might be uncovered. It is the fact that in spite of all the restriction the Brazilian government throws in his way, he still is able to find ugly stuff, and it is not so much mallicious as utterly incompetent.
If elephants are smart enough to recognize an enemy, avoid it, and warn other elephants that have not seen this enemy first hand... do they qualify as people?
They certainly seem at least as smart as dolphins, and their trunks allow for a crude form of tool manipulation that dolphins lack. We humans define our personhood in terms not just of raw intelligence, but also by our ability to modify our environments, so...
Peak oil did happen in the 1970s. American peak oil, that's it. The reason we have had the last couple of decades of Middle East adventurism is because the US stopped being the largest oil producer back then. OPEC would not even exist if that was not the case.
Conventional Oil has supposedly peaked sometime in the 2005-2010 timeframe, though you are correct that more innovative extraction techniques have compensated the lost of conventional sources so far. However, you grossly overestimate the capacity of price signals to conjure up solutions out of thin air. Instead, what has allowed a more or less sustained living standard on the face of steady per capita oil consumption are countless hours of engineering devoted to efficiency.
At the end of day, the tragedy of the Peak Oil movement of the past decade is something that happens to a lot of geeks. They were able to calculate a fairly accurate mathematic model of the raise and fall of production, but their predictions of doom failed to grasp the fact that society adapts to changing conditions. Their economic models turned out to be too simple, and both private and public sector reacted by taking measures that would have been imposible to predict on a quarterly profits only analysis.
Last scandal at my hometown, that is unlikely to reach the English speaking world, is as follows.
Our airport, which lays on federal grounds, grants a monopoly of transportation services to certain well established company. Not even city taxis are allowed in (they can drop passangers, but cannot pick up anyone else while they are on premises). Uber attitude towards this situation is the standard one, basically an extended middle finger to every law, institution or authority of the land.
The problem is that if airport security catches an unofficial taxi on premises, they call federal police, the car is taken to a seized and the driver cannot recover until he's paid a very considerable fine (think several months of blue collar wages). Uber strategy to deal with that is to swarm security, so they always catch someone, but the process to deal with the offender is very time consuming and all other Uber cars are free to do business while the guards are preocupied.
Uber will punish any driver that refuses to take airport calls with bad karma, and will "gratiuouly" pay for your fine... once (if you get caught twice, it is on you), but they will not pay you any wages while your car is locked in federal grounds (a time that is measured in weeks, not days). They will also not pay for any damages to the car itself, which unfortunatelly is a rampant problem in this country when vehicles end up under the custody of the government.
So, be very glad to have a car and a chauffeur at your fingertips beck and call, but please do not assume the driver is enjoying it as much as you do.
But the unwritten agreement was that if you probe yourself useful enough, you would be accepted as a kind of junior member of the club. Then your children would be Ok to marry their children, and your grandchildren would be undistinguishible from the rest of the elite's offspring.
The number of experts in CS is not constrained by availability of resources (though that might not be the case for every field), but the number of people that have: 1. a minimum of inteligence to get through it, and 2. The motivation and determination to strive at reaching expert level over a long period of time.
So, throwing more resources at this will only marginally increase with the production of experts. Maybe it will lower the bar of #1 a bit, but the bottleneck is really in #2 and the people that are not willing to work hard and keep working hard despite apparent failure will drop off anyways.
It is the same with open source community. By now, we should be literally swiming in free software. Instead, what happened is that society use of open source increased, but hackers willing to volunteer their time remained the same or even diminished over the years (every kid dreams with being an entrepraeneur and hit it rich these days, nobody wants to be a dirty hippy anymore). The slack has been picked up by paid employees from sponsor companies instead.
But other than the epithets, my point stands. Knowing what an eigenvalue is, or how to calculate it, is not the only type of intelligence there is around, and not necessarily the most important one. You can tell that is a fact and not an opinion by checking what percentage of the world leaders (both of government and of industry) are engineers or scientists. Furthermore, if you look at people like Angela Merkel, who is a trained scientist and a world leader, you will notice they did not reach that state in life by knowing lots of math and science, but by noticing conventional politicians have a different type of cunning, and by applying their very big brains to outsmart those politicians in their own game.
In other words, your complain about lack of scientific awareness in the article is a red herring. It may be accurate, but it is not useful because the political purpose of the article does not depend on that. You could tell it even is a feature because the intended audience of the piece also lack scientific awareness.
So, you can freely choose to feel loathing and to disregard the artice, or you can choose to acknowledge it as an attempt to shape public perception in a way that harms the interest of your industry/profession. If you put it in those terms, calling "fault, unfair!!!" in a game with no referee and no explicit rules is a strong indicator that you are loosing and cannot cope.
Let's assume Buddism was the ultimate truth of how the Universe work. Would it be Ok for a Buddist to interrupt a debate about criminal law with the remark that, given reincarnation, all murders are an illusion???
People feel inside like they have free will, and they are not going to change that opinion because of your argument. If a men in a white labcoat tells them to disregard their own feelings and surrender to the BigBadCompany, they are not going to do so... they are going to label people in white coats as "manipulative enemy". Furthermore, they are going to label everyone that oppose people in white coats, - antivaxers, prolifers, climate change deniers, etc, - as "potential ally".
So, you want to stop Donald Trump from taking over the world??? Why don't you stop preaching to the choir while alienating everyone else?
And given the fact that the other tribes are more numerous, have bigger and hairier and angrier primates with longer and sharper sticks, this particular stupidity may turn out to be of the suicidal kind...
I did not read anything there that was openly hostile to us. Critic of unintended consequences, yes; but that reflects more on our collective disregard for such than on then author's biases.
If you had a hard time reading through it, that reflects positivelly on your character: It means you are not a self-serving cynic yet. The question is how to channel that emotional energy into making our profession one that serves the public as it claims to be, instead of preying on the public as more often than not we end up being.
My wife's happy medium is, basically, to not login until a close relative or friend (usually her mother) phones and tells her there's something there to check; and at that time to batch process the latest events in her wall. This way she still is in contact with everyone she cares about, but it only eats a couple of hours of her week, at well defined blocks of time.