Shawn is an American spelling of Sean (which is not an English name, by
the way, it's Irish. It does appear in Scotland, but IIRC, the Gaelic
version is Ian).
[Sluggo]
Ian means Sean??? I thought Ian meant John. Or does Sean mean John too?
The latter. Sean is an Irish mispronunciation of John
[Breen]
Bingo.
Also Seamus == Hamish == James.
Give the man a "Do Unspeakable Things To Me, I'm Irish (For a Given
Value of 'Irish')" t-shirt!
[Breen]
Here in the States, my surname is always considered Irish. I'm well
aware that in Ireland they'll tell you that it's English.
Nah. I thought it was Irish.
[Breen]
It's Anglo-Norman in origin -- Moleyns (as in Moulin) making it a
cognate of Miller.
[Sluggo]
Is that like the "My weiner is lucky" T-shirts that appeared right before
St Patrick's Day?
A friend in Dublin sent me a great St Patrick's Day card. It showed two
businessmen with shamrocks and green and other "lucky" things all over
their briefcases and suits, but they had "bah humbug!" expressions in
spite of that.
Note: yanks don't send St Patrick's Day cards. At least none that I've
ever heard of.
Um... that's the first time I've ever heard of a St. Patrick's Day card.
Will those Hallmark fiends stop at nothing?
The article talks mostly about the cultural differences between Unix and
Windows; it says Raymond gets this wrong because he doesn't understand
Windows culture, but still recommends the book for its general insights.
'I have heard economists claim that Silicon Valley could never be
recreated in, say, France, because the French culture puts such a high
penalty on failure that entrepreneurs are not willing to risk it. Maybe
the same thing is true of Linux: it may never be a desktop operating
system because the culture values things which prevent it. OS X is the
proof: Apple finally created Unix for Aunt Marge, but only because the
engineers and managers at Apple were firmly of the end-user culture (which
I've been imperialistically calling "the Windows Culture" even though
historically it originated at Apple). They rejected the Unix culture's
fundamental norm of programmer-centricity. They even renamed core
directories -- heretical! -- to use common English words like
"applications" and "library" instead of "bin" and "lib."'
[Rick]
Yeah, they're not people who senselessly put up with endless churn and
mind-numbing complexity at the behest of a monopolist vendor; they're
just plain folks working to help Aunt Marge in contrast to those
luftmenschen Unix (especially Linux) people who aspire to actually be in
charge of their computing. Joel and Co. are so tragically
misunderstood I'm getting all misty-eyed, just thinking about it.
Yeah, Aunt Marge will never be able to figure out her TiVo or use
Google, right, Joel?
You'll have to wade through a large amount of tedious and irrelevant
argumentum ad hominem, probably included as filler because Spolsky has
otherwise so little to say -- and, of course, none of even that residuum
about (in contrast to Raymond's work) the key issue of where control
resides, as Spolsky's crowd gave that up long ago without much thought.
I don't really mind the four minutes I wasted on that review, but in an
ideal world I'd really rather have them back.
[Jimmy]
Um... where? I see a lot of general arguments against the Unix
approach, but not against Raymond personally. The closest to an ad
hominem argument I saw was this:
"Whenever he opens his mouth about Windows he tends to show that his
knowledge of Windows programming comes mostly from reading newspapers,
not from actual Windows programming. That's OK; he's not a Windows
programmer; we'll forgive that."
and, uh... that's true from what I remember of the text in question.
"NT has file attributes in some of its file system types. They are
used in a restricted way, to implement access-control lists on some
file systems, and don't affect development style very much."
Umm.... that's kinda true, for given values of 'true'.
NT doesn't use attributes in the POSIX sense, it uses separate file
streams. Each file on NTFS is more like its own directory, and
arbitrary streams can be added to each file without restriction
(xattrs on Linux are restricted to 64k, BTW). Heck, they could even
add automatic versioning and really show NT's VMS roots if they
wanted.
"Most programs cannot be scripted at all. Programs rely on complex,
fragile remote procedure call (RPC) methods to communicate with each
other, a rich source of bugs."
Again, true for a given value of true.
Most programs can't be scripted in the Unix way - by parsing the
output - but can be scripted using OLE Automation. This is where that
RPC confusion comes in: it's actually a C++ vtable on the local
machine, with an extra part that describes the type information for
each function (like Java's reflection API), which removes the need to
write a wrapper for each programming language as you have to do in
Unix land. Windows comes with a DCE RPC implementation, and will
automatically marshal OLE interfaces across RPC for free if you decide
to call a remote machine, but otherwise there is no overhead for
compiled languages, and a little for interpreted.
If the amount of times Unix has been cloned is a testament to how good
an idea it was, bear in mind that COM has been cloned several times
(OOo's UNO, Mozilla's XPCOM, GNOME's Bonobo, KDE's (now discarded)
original component system, etc.)
[Rick]
1. Otherwise irrelevant swipe about "idiotarianism", a term
Raymond had briefly attempted to popularise in the context of
his politics blog.
2. Reference to "the frequently controversial Eric S. Raymond".
Note: Passive-aggressives in the technical community have been
lately falling back on the term "controversial" to denote
someone whom you wish to suggest is somehow unsuitable and
doubtful without actually presenting any honest argument as
to why. I caught a business-school professor from San Jose
State University recently trying to pull that bit of gutter
rhetoric on the OSI license-discuss mailing list against
outgoing OSI general counsel Lawrence Rosen. It was
a disreputable bit of trickery there, and it is here, too.
3. The juvenile, thrown-in inclusion of a hyperlink to Raymond's 1999
"Surprised by Wealth" slightly inarticulate burblings about
(temporarily, as it turns out) having paper-only winnings in
the stock market from the VA Linux Systems IPO. Even the
Slashdot trolls eventually got tired of cruelly waving the
"Gee, you thought you were going to get rich, huh?" line at
Raymond, but Spolsky hasn't.
All of that gratuitous personal nastiness formed part of what Spolsky
lead with in his initial paragraphs. You might not have noticed it,
but I did -- and it both distracted from the distinctly limited merits
of his review's real content and sufficed to convince me that the
man's a raving jerk.
[Kapil]
The analogy Japan<->
America = Windows/Mac<->
Unix is flawed.
There are cultural differences between the users for whom the
Mac/Windows/Gnome/KDE folks design interfaces and the users for whom
the Unix interface is designed.
However, it is possible and indeed imperative(*) for users of the first
kind (whom Spolsky calls non-programmers) to make the transition (at
their own pace) to the users of the second kind (programmers). (**)
The difference between Gnome/KDE and Windows is that in the latter
case the interface puts up barriers to this transition.(***)
(*) But there is no such imperative for people from one part of the
world to adapt/adopt food habits from another part of the world.
(**) The logic of the world as it currently works is that those who do
not (slowly but) steadily improve their understanding/usage of the tools
they use will soon become incapable.
(***) I cannot decide exactly where to put Mac OS X.
[Jimmy]
I have to admit here that I didn't bother following the links from
that paragraph, and going by the text, I thought it was a favourable
review:
"The frequently controversial Eric S. Raymond has just written a long
book about Unix programming called The Art of UNIX Programming
exploring his own culture in great detail."
[snip cultural differences....]
"on the whole, the book is so full of incredibly interesting insight
into so many aspects of programming that I'm willing to hold my nose
during the rare smelly ideological rants because there's so much to
learn about universal ideals from the rest of the book. Indeed I would
recommend this book to developers of any culture in any platform with
any goals, because so many of the values which it trumpets are
universal."
Aside from your third point, though, I think you're reading a bit too
much into it: the guy is writing for an audience who have either not
heard of Raymond, or who would most likely have an unfavourable
impression that he's referring to -- "Don't be put off the book
because of its author".
[Rick]
That's a generous interpretation, and it speaks well for you, but not
for Spolsky.
All of those three points, however, have been popular standbys of a
certain Slashdot-type ad hominem squad that's been showing up --
invariably relying on anonymous postings -- in pretty much any
discussion of Raymond, his writings, or his software or the last seven
or eight years: Spolsky gives every appearance of having cribbed his
"amusing", take-the-subject-down-a-peg-or-two references directly from
the gossipers.
Those gossipers had a field day with Raymond for promoting the
"idiotarian" concept on his politics blog, and then more so when he made
the mistake of listing that in the Jargon File (which entry he later
removed, upon reflection). And there's no conceivable reason to cite
that in a book review, other than to serve as a personal swipe.
[Jimmy]
OK, I'm conviced, especially since I went back to the article and
noticed the date.
While we're on the topic, I went by Wikipedia's article
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond) after I sent that last
mail, my PC crashed, I went back, and... the section titled
'Criticism' had changed to 'Trivia' -- it seems there has been a very
slow edit war going on over the past few days.
[John]
Attacks of ESR aside, one slightly off-color aspect I noticed in the
review was a cited quote from an exec at Red Hat, taken from Nov 2003,
which stated that Linux was not yet ready to be considered as being on
equal footing with that other OS in the regard of ease of install and
use by non-tech savvy types.
...............
So here we are, 20 years after Unix developers started trying to
paint a good user interface on their systems, and we're still at
the point where the CEO of the biggest Linux vendor is telling
people that home users should just use Windows.
...............
I followed his link to the source of the quote, and saw that it was
published in Nov 2003, and that the article went on to say:
...............
Szulik gave an example of his 90-year-old father going to a
local retailer in order to purchase a computer with Linux: "We
know painfully well what happens. He will try to get it
installed and either doesn't have a positive experience or
puts a lot of pressure on your support systems," he said.
However, Szulik expects Linux to be ready in a couple of years
after it has had time to mature.
...............
I don't mean to assert that the more ubiquitous platform doesn't maintain
the advantage for wide OEM support, but depending on the apps that the
user is going to run, the gap has been narrowing steadily over time, and
for an ever increasing number of home users, Linux makes a very adequate
replacement for MSW.
The citation of that quote also seems a bit misleading, in that it's quite
easy to assume that it was more contemporaneous, rather than nearly two
years old, and in the context of technological advances, nearly two years
is a long time.
[Jimmy]
Erm... that review was published a month after the quote in question.
(As I said in my last mail in this thread, I didn't notice the date
either
.
[John]
Oops, missed it both places - could be time for the semi-annual cleaning
of the spectacles.
I say X-GOOGLE-VERHOEVEN and thought "what the heck is that?". I googled
(Admittedly not a very good way to find something if this a huge
conspiracy. <grin>
for it on the web and on Google groups, but that
only turned up mailing list archive posts where people were posting the
output of fetchmail -v in an effort to get their mail working.
My next step was to see if the extension introducted any obviously named
commands:
I tried several other permutations: X-GOOGLE, GOOGLE, GOOGLE-VERHOEVEN.
Each one returned the same error code.
So I wonder: What is this thing? Is it just some tag saying "Yes, this
is Google's mail service"?
[Sluggo]
Should've yahoo'd or msn'd it. That'll show them.
Actually, I tried Yahoo, which didn't return any hits. I'd forgotten
about MSN. It didn't return anything either. It's indicative of
something (Google's massive market share? Forgetfulness? I don't
know.) that I couldn't think of any non-Google search engines other than
Yahoo.
[Ben]
It's that X-GOOGLE-VERHOEVEN extension. It sets a default state for
search_engine_lookup() in your brain... you're doomed, doomed I tell
you.
[Jimmy]
Well, they are the only search engine with a moon mapping facility
(http://moon.google.com - today's the anniversary of the first manned
moon landing, but you guys knew that, right?)
[Breen]
I certainly did. (You have zoomed all the way in on google's moon,
right?)
[Jimmy]
Nah, I'm on dial-up. I'll be sure to do so tomorrow when I get a
chance to go to a 'net cafe, but I think I can guess what I'll see.
Heather pointed me to your site, including your photos.
[Sluggo]
Are you going to bait us all and not give us the URL?
Nah, just you. I emailed the URL to every single other person on
the list privately - in fact, everyone else in the world - just to leave
you out of the loop and watch you do this jumping up and down act; it's
far too amusing to miss. So, everybody except you is in on the joke.
Perhaps we'll all take pity on you if you do it long enough.
[Sluggo]
Grumble, what do you expect from a guy who lives on a boat so he can make
a fast getaway anytime.
"Fast getaway". On a 37' sailboat. Riiiight.
FYI:
Average speed for non-planing hulls = sqrt(waterline_length)
Top speed -"- : sqrt(waterline_length) * ~1.3
Ulysses' LWL: ~32 feet.
HINT: Sailboats do not have afterburners, ramscoops, or braking jets.
Reentry speeds are whatever the crane operator feels is safe - i.e.,
somewhere around 1 ft./minute (no heat-resistant tiles required.) Andy
Green and Thrust SSC have nothing to fear from wind-driven machines, and
Chuck Yeager in his X-1 never got to experience being outrun and
outmaneuvered by a schooner or a yawl.
We do, however, make trans-oceanic passages - something that 99% of
powerboaters will never be able to do aboard their boat - and burn zero
to minimal fuel in the process. We also don't have to rely on
bad-tempered machinery that could leave us stranded at any second.
There's also the fact that wind is free... and with the cost of gas
nowadays, that speaks to a lot of people.
[Sluggo]
Not a peep from you about hurricanes this time. I take it you were
unaffected?
I'll be sure to let you know if one of them kills me.
...
Eventually.
[Sluggo]
Or is your computer sending preprogrammed posthumous
messages?
[Sluggo]
On a similar line, from another James Hogan book Voyage from Yesteryear ,
chapter 11. A human is talking to a robot.
...............
-- What kind of machine are you? I mean, can you think like a person? Do
you know who you are?
-- Suppose I said I could. Would that tell you anything?
-- I guess not. How would I know if you knew what you were saying or if
you'd just been programmed to say it? There's no way of telling the
difference.
-- Then is there any difference?
Driscoll frowned, thought about it, then dismissed it with a shake of his
head.
...............
Mike, if you're trying to tell us a) that you're a robot, and b) that we
won't be able to tell the difference, you're way behind the curve. I
mean, look at that mechanistic Python language thing you use: obviously
robot-only fare. I mean, good *grief!* The thing treats whitespace as
if it was significant. What else would you have to know to say "Yep,
this guy is a Venusian Zombie Killer Robot - run for your lives!"
What a lovely,
perfectly English cottage (including the satellite dish!) - and what a
magnificently malevolent-looking cat! I hope you don't mind me keeping a
copy of that pic; he represents a certain visually-unambiguous ideal.
))
[Thomas]
Hehehe. Not at all, you're quite welcome. It's a she, as it happens.
"Mildred" is her name. She likes to hunt rabbits, mice, birds, and
squirrels. I have seen twice now, while I have been here, two
de-headed squirrels. :/ Yuck.
She isn't ferocious. She meaows
a lot, and takes a shining to me, as all animals seem to do. She has
sharp claws though, so watch out.
Continuing on the photo theme, I have more of the coast (a mere mile
and a half walk away, across the farmland) that I will try and upload
to Heather -- but I am putting together a more coherent website with
these images on, providing a running commentary. I'm hoping Mike Orr
will appreciate it as well. I've hopefully done him a favour (I do not
mean for it to be patronising or condescending in anyway) and taken a
picture of a Caravan and a static-caravan for him to compare. (Mike
knows what I'm rabbitting on about.)
[Sluggo]
I've already forgotten what a static-caravan is. A trailer that's not
built to be moved very often?
(This was from a word discussion. Apparently a trailer is called a
caravan in England. Here a caravan is a mode of travel ("several
vehicles travelling together"), not a type of vehicle. The Dodge
Caravan notwithstanding.
http://www.dodge.com/caravan
[Thomas]
This connection I'm on now relies on tin cans,
string, and some sort of goat sacrifice...
[Brian]
That it requires goat sacrifice is one thing, that it requires "some
sort" of goat sacrifice implies more than one type of goat sacrifice
possibly necessary for certain 'net connections through BT (one
presumes). That you KNOW that there's more than one type of goat
sacrifice has me slightly concerned.
.brian (who's also glad to know you weren't in the wrong place that day...)
I find that curried goat makes for quite a good sacrifice - especially
if I'm the one being sacrificed to. A touch of scotch bonnet sauce and
perhaps a squeeze of "sower orange", and it will ameliorate my wrath and
charm my savage breast...
[Thomas]
Ah, a man that speaks from experience.
[Thomas]
The route to the sea also follows the river Brad, which has lots of
fish in. I want to go fishing now.
[Sluggo]
Tell Brad hi when you meet it. Britian has such interesting place
names, starting with the river Thames. And in bonnie Scotland: Lost,
Wick, Tongue, John o' Groats, Thurso. Oh, and here's an interesting
one, Baile an Or. (Is that the Gold Town? Or something named after me?
BTW, Vancouver has a skytrain station called Braid.
[Brian]
That must have been one wicked track design...
[Jimmy]
Heh. You need to get a copy of "The Meaning of Liff" by Douglas Adams
and... erm... someone else. They took several place names from around
Britain and provided definitions for them
A lurid facial bruise which everyone politely omits to mention because
it's obvious that you had a punch-up with your spouse last night - but
which was actually caused by walking into a door. It is useless to
volunteer the true explanation because nobody will believe it.
...............
[Rick]
Which reminds me: My sweetie Deirdre Saoirse Moen and I will be
visiting the place "The Meaning of Liff" defines thus...
...............
GLASGOW (n.)
The feeling of infinite sadness engendered when walking through a place
filled with happy people fifteen years younger than yourself.
...............
via a very brief sojourn in the familiar spot alluded to inside here...
...............
AIRD OF SLEAT (n. archaic)
Ancient Scottish curse placed from afar on the stretch of land now
occupied by Heathrow Airport.
Alas, we will not have time to wander elsewhere in the UK.
[Sluggo]
Or as Forsyth's film That Sinking Feeling , which is set in Glasgow, says:
...............
The characters in this film are entirely fictitious.
There is no such place as Glasgow.
...............
The film with that memorable line, "There must be something more to life
than committing suicide."
The flash in the pan has fizzled out...
From Rick Moen
Quoting Benjamin A. Okopnik (ben@linuxgazette.net):
> It's *possible* that [foo] acted in what he thought was good faith.
(Name elided from the quotation to stress that I'm mounting the soapbox
to make a general point that I hope will enligh^Wentertain.)
It costs nothing to postulate good faith about people one is talking
about; in my opinion doing so is both good manners and superior
tactics.
In the hypothetical edge case of having stone-hard evidence, ready to
post and likely to be understood, it is still usually much more
damning to cite the evidence without comment, and let listeners reach
obvious conclusions on their own. Why? Because of an odd rhetorical
effect.
If I tell you "X is an irredeemable jerk, and I'm going to prove it to you",
you will tend to unconsciously set your mind to resist the sales pitch
and dream up any possible reasons why you might remain unpersuaded.
It's human nature; if we're pushed, we lean the other way, out of habit.
By contrast, if I just start talking in a matter-of-fact fashion without
apparent axe-grinding about various uncontested facts about X's doings,
and you're moved to comment "What a wanker!", you'll tend to hold that
conviction pretty firmly because (or so you think) you arrived at it on
your own. In fact, you might dig in and start trying to convince me
*I'm* being too kind.
So, next time you see me being nice about someone, or even protesting
other people's too-hasty condemnation of him, please remember that
generosity of spirit might have nothing to do with it: It might be a
devilishly clever Machiavellian intrigue in disguise.
Sent in my usability article. I finished it last night but my Internet
access went kaput. Both the ISP and Qwest said everything's fine. I'm
wondering if it's a bad modem or bad Ethernet card. The light on the
Ethernet card and modem blinks like there's no tomorrow, even after I turn
the computer off, until I unplug it. Some new kind of hardware hackery?
"Do you know what your Ethernet card is doing?"
[Heather]
It's 10 pm, do you know where all 10 of your Mb are...
So I'll be semi-offline for a while. If you need to contact me for
anything, call [phone number].
Song of the month: "On Any Other Day", The Police
...............
My wife has burned the scrambled eggs
The dog just pissed my leg
My teenage daughter ran away
My fine young son has turned out gay
... AND IT WOULD BE OKAY ON ANY OTHER DAY!!!
...............
[Jimmy]
And quote of the day, from Mil Millington's mailing list: "Fiona Walker
is the only best-selling romantic novelist who has ever started talking
to me in a bar about buying horse sperm off the Internet. (That's not
really relevant, but I sensed you'd what (sic) to know it anyway.)"
[Heather]
The fortune cookie of the moment was the lyrics from Dark Side of the Moon.
"...as a matter of fact, it's all dark."
Heather "still crunching and munching yes I know we're late" grabs my
white-rabbit type hat and races back down the rabbithole again.
I had to go to the library to upload the article. Since I didn't have a
floppy drive I was about to buy a USB stick, then I thought, "My camera is
a mass storage device. Maybe I can upload an arbitrary file to it." And
it worked.
[Jimmy]
Yeah, I've done that with my camera, and the smart media card from my
brother's portastudio. (Which reminds me -- I have to replace that.
Turns out these things don't cope well with power failure
[Ben]
The Geek Resurgens, ne plus ultra! Can't kill 'im with a stick!
Well done, Mike. Me, I'd have had to wind a bunch of wire on some iron
cores, and hope that the library computer would accept a pair of car
battery clamps as serial input.
[Jimmy]
And heck, if the librarians have a problem with that, they can also
double as a means of persuasion.
I finally got the chance to read this months edition of the LG and saw
this interesting discussion about Playboy hosting mirror.
I had noticed it last year when I was trying to download something off
cpan. I took a screenshot of it since I didn't expect anyone to believe
me without it. If you are curious here's a link to that blog entry:
[Jimmy]
[ Sharp intake of breath ]
You mean it set your desktop background for you too? That's what I call service!
Yup. If you want a copy of the background let me know.
BTW if you trying to get to the above site right now, you won't get
through. 'cause some unknown reason my LVS (Linux Virtual Server)
decided to reset to its default blank settings. I am trying to get in
touch with the Tech Support but so far havn't heard anything yet.
So As a side note, does anyone know any reliable web hosting service? I
want PHP, MySQL, Perl on the server with SSH access and a decent
transfer limit. If anyone knows a good hosting service let me know.
Naive comparison is a real problem, and even things that seem to be
"apples to apples" -- say, a comparison between the vendor-announced
vulnerability counts of Microsoft Windows XP SP1 vs. Redhat Linux 9 --
fall apart the moment you compare what's in the box for both. XPSP1
ships with no databases, while Redhat ships with at least MySQL and
PostgreSQL. Should Redhat be penalized for warning customers of
potential problems that might be experienced on their platform,
despite the fact that they didn't even write the software to begin
with? When Oracle on XP has a vulnerability, Microsoft does not need
to put out an advisory, instead Oracle does. Should Microsoft be
referred to as a more secure platform because standard disclosure
policies do not extend to announcing problems in software acquired
entirely from a third party? Would Redhat suddenly become more secure
if you had to download MySQL and PostgreSQL from their respective
authors, with the requisite advisories coming from those authors and
thus not counting from Redhat itself?
Bad metrics encourage bad decisions. Those that compare naively
encourage naive security. It's 2005; it's a little late for that.
...............
rms vs. Harry Potter
From Jimmy O'Regan
Amusing, and topical:
...............
Don't Buy Harry Potter Books
Canadians have been ordered not to read books that were sold to them
"by mistake" . Read that article, then don't buy any Harry Potter
books. Everyone who participated in requesting, issuing, enforcing, or
trying to excuse this injunction is the enemy of human rights in
Canada, and they all deserve to pay for their part in it. Not buying
these books will at least make the publisher pay.
Unlike the publisher, who demands that people not read these books, I
simply call on people not to buy them. If you wish to read them, wait,
and you will meet someone who did get a copy. Borrow that copy--don't
buy one. Even better, read something else--there are plenty of other
books just as good, or (dare one suggest) even better.
Making Canada respect human rights will be hard, but a good first step
is to identify the officials and legislators who do not support them.
The article quotes a lawyer as saying, "There is no human right to
read." Any official, judge, or legislator who is not outraged by this
position does not deserve to be in office.
[Neil]
Sending out spoilers on mailing lists is guaranteed to upset someone. I assume
RMS included it to make people who read it less likely to buy. I think it's
an unpleasant tactic and it makes me less inclined to support him on this.
If any of the gang want to redistribute this article further, please snip the
spoilers.
Whoops. Time of morning: I c 'n' p'd from the wrong tab.
[Brian]
Interesting. The paragraph with the spoilers in it isn't on the page
referenced in the URL. Did RMS self-censor (unlikely), or ???
[Jay]
RMS is a shithead, and now I believe it.
And no, I don't blame Jimmy for this.
[Sluggo]
He's right though. When did reading become a "human right" like, oh,
the right to practice your religion and not be killed?
Redneck Texan: what in tar-nation are they talkin about, "human right to
read"? Next thing y'all know they'll be askin for the right to a
mansion on the beach. And that other thing they keep harpin about, that
loonie-versal health care whatsit. In my father's day people never
asked for a handout, they worked and provided for themselves like God
intended.
[Neil]
Yep. One quote I agree with. Elevating reading to a human right seems
excessive, so unlike RMS, I am not enraged by that particular quote.
I would support the idea of a right to sufficient education to be able to
read. I would also support the idea that people have a right to enjoy a book
that they have purchased legally and in good faith, but a right to read any
book or document you want, regardless of whether it not it's published or
confidential is another matter. What would a "right to read" cover and in
what circumstances, I would like to know?
If the injunction really orders them not to read the books they have
purchased, that strikes me as wrong, but hey, we all know the law is an ass,
even in Canada. If I'd bought a book and got an injunction like this, I'd
still read it, I just wouldn't tell them
[Ben]
...and if we extend that line of reasoning just a bit further, it brings
us to (what I think is) RMS' original point. How much of a right do we
grant to our governments to declare arbitrary actions illegal, no matter
how trivial or harmless?
The cynic in me says that governments love having their citizens buy
into a belief that they (the citizens) are guilty of something; people
with something to hide are likely to keep their heads down and be good
little sheep lest they be noticed and shorn. As the saying in Russia
went, "nobody ever asks 'why' when the KGB takes them away." The KGB, of
course, had a matching expression: "if we have the man, we'll make the
case."
If the government is allowed to control trivial aspects of people's
lives, then they will do so. Not in all cases, but... oh, the
"opportunities" that arise. Perhaps this case is not as black-and-white
as it could be, but I surely do see it as a very steep and well-greased
slippery slope - with its entry point just under a hidden trap door.
[Sluggo]
... which comes back to my original point, that there is also a slippery
slope / trap door on the other side. In order to get a diverse
coalition of people (the whole world) to agree to and enforce something,
it has to be narrowly focused and not arbitraily "reinterpreted". It
has long been recognized internationally that people have a right to not
be imprisoned/tortured/killed for their ethnicity, religion, or
participating in political protests. That's what's normally considered
"human rights", and it's why China is under so much scrutiny. Canada
and the EU have more inclusive definitions of basic rights, but those
apply only in those countries and cannot be summarily exported to the
rest of the world as "human rights". China's censorship of the Internet
is deplorable but is not (yet) a "human rights violation".
[Ben]
[blink] Since when is getting the entire world to ratify something a
rational goal? I don't think it's possible - except by the method
employed by US politicians and so aptly described by Dave Barry.
...............
We make presidential candidates go through a lengthy and highly
embarrassing process that a person with even the tiniest shred of
dignity would never get involved in. It's analogous to the ice-breaking
party game "Twister," wherein somebody spins a pointer, and the players
have to put their hands and feet on whatever colored circles it points
to, thus winding up in humiliating positions. And the people who want
to be president have to play. If the spinning pointer of political
necessity points to SUCK UP TO UNIONS, they have to put their left hands
over on that circle; if the spinner points to SUCK UP TO RELIGIOUS NUTS,
they have to put their right feet in that circle; and so on, month
after month, with candidates dropping out one by one as the required
contortions become too difficult, until finally there's only one
candidate left--some sweaty, exhausted, dignity-free yutz in a
grotesquely unnatural pose, with his tie askew and his shirt untucked
and his butt crack showing.
-- Dave Barry
...............
The effect is that nobody gets what they want, and whatever agreement
is reached is so watered down that it's meaningless - and, as a
result, is ignored by everyone. E.g., UN's decisions about Iraq, and
damn near everything else since then (and about half of everything since
UN's inception.)
[Sluggo]
Better to try than to throw up your hands and say it's impossible.
[Ben]
Better to try something different and effective (assuming there is
such an option) than keeping on with something that has long lost its
force.
[Sluggo]
So
creating the UN and its human rights commission and Geneva convention
and ICC et al was a waste of time? I disagree.
[Ben]
I would too, if somebody had said what you're implying I've said. The UN
was very useful at the time of its creation - despite Russia managing to
wangle two seats instead of the one they should have had - but these
days, it's a debating society with damn near no force or effect. I've
known several people - Canadians who had been with their peacekeeping
force - and the strong impression that I got from them was that of
despondency, of rolling that same useless rock up that same useless
mountain, only to have it roll back down again.
At this point, the Big Guys - US and Russia, and to some lesser degree
everyone else - has found their own ways to circumvent or bypass (and in
case of serious disagreement, simply ignore) the UN. My contention is
that it is no longer useful as a vehicle for maintaining peace or a
round table for mediation/negotiation - all of that now goes on at
high-level conferences, which were rarer and more difficult to arrange
in the days when the UN was created.
[Sluggo]
And what were the
alternatives? At least the UN has prevented World War III so far (with
NATO), which was its main purpose.
[Ben]
I think you're giving the UN far too much credit. For one thing, the
projections for WWIII are pretty horrific - at least the ones that we
had when I was in Military Intelligence - and they're not likely to have
improved (<black_humor>except in the kill ratios</black_humor>.) Nuclear
deterrent would be the number one cause, in my mind - not in the number
of people that are likely to die (why would the politicians care? They
never did before), but in the fact that the high-level decision makers -
despite their bunkers, etc. - are much more likely to, or are far less
likely to survive the aftermath.
Nukes make it personal for them. That, to my mind, is the only thing
that will stop them from issuing those orders.
[Sluggo]
The UN has been ineffective in stopping the genocides in
Rwanda/Bosnia/Somalia/Sudan -- but so were its critics.
[Ben]
Errr... so, if I say that a radio doesn't work, my inability to repair
it makes my observation false? Please reconsider what you're saying
here, Mike.
Amy Chua in "World on Fire" describes, in fine detail, how the US
exportation of (some screwed-up version of) democracy plus the
free-market system leads to civil wars and murder of
economically-dominant minorities. It's damn near impossible to disagree
with her data, or the conclusions she draws from it - the lady is
quite sharp. However, she doesn't say "...and here's how to fix it!"
Does that make her observations inaccurate, or her book of no value? I
sincerely doubt it.
[Sluggo]
Re Iraq, I can't comment further without the missing piece -- what you
think the UN did wrong and should have done. You think they should have
supported the US intervention? I think not.
[Ben]
I think that the UN did what they could. The overriding issue is that
they could do nothing effective, except make their statement for the
world to hear - something that is done just as effectively by a protest
march in DC. That's not saying a lot for the UN.
Just to add a personal viewpoint here: I find it sad that this is the
state of the UN, and wish with all my heart that it did have more
effect. But when a rabbit mediates a disagreement between two bears, the
effect of that mediation is not likely to be much - and the rabbit is
likely to get eaten for his trouble.
[Ben]
US and China, for example, have many mutually incompatible goals,
long-term plans, and cultural imperatives. Expecting China to agree with
the US on human rights is a waste of time - particularly since China is
strong enough to not worry about the US in military terms. The human
rights issue between the two is, therefore, at a standstill - but
Walmart still buys 80%+ of what they sell in China.
Remind me again why China should care about anything the US says?
[Sluggo]
The slippery slope is that the more things you pack into this
definition, the less willing a lot of people will be to accept the whole
thing. For instance, the US administration is reinterpreting free trade
and property rights to include perpetual copyrights, anti-circumvention
provisions, and software patents.
[Ben]
Therefore making itself that much less relevant to the world market.
[shrug] If the idiots wielding the broom don't watch out, the tide will
sweep them out to sea.
[Sluggo]
Now, one could make a case that these
should be property rights and included, but instead the administration
is bypassing the debate and arguing these are self-evidently property
rights. Not surprisingly, there is much resistance in other countries,
fears about whether free trade is a synonym for US corporate hegemony,
and wonderings about why countries should harm their own vitality to
benefit foreign patents. Likewise, there is much resistance in the US
to the "right" to living quarters, health care, welfare etc -- this is
seen as the foot in the door for socialism, 90% taxation, and burnt work
ethic. (Didn't you say something about the KGB?) So, do you want to
support basic human rights, or do you want to throw other things in and
weaken support for the basic rights?
[Ben]
If I thought that was a valid question, it would certainly be a dillema.
As it is, I don't see them as mutually exclusive.
[Sluggo]
Stallman has made a good case over the years that the right to read
anything is fundamental. Obviously, not being able to study holy texts
would significantly impact people's practice of religion. So would not
having access to news or commentary. And fiction books often express a
political view or framework, sometimes more valuable than the author
realizes. So it's impossible to censor non-essential texts while
excepting essential, because inevitably you will misclassify an
essential text.
Still, the extremes to which "free speech" and "free reading" can be
taken are ridiculous. Exactly how does suppressing Harry Potter for
two days harm Canadians' access to an adequate variety of
information?
[Ben]
That's not the grounds on which I find the court's decision to be less
than intelligent. Trying to enforce something that is fundamentally
unenforceable - arrogating to themselves the right to decide that you
should voluntarily surrender the value of that for which you have paid -
those are the things which set off all sorts of alarms for me. With
regard to the adequate information issue, I agree with you - I don't
think that this has been violated, or was even involved.
[Rick]
It does seem quite an overreaction. Judges in (to my knowledge) almost
all countries tend to be a bit sweeping in their application of court
orders -- being demigods in their sphere -- and a little sloppy. But,
as you say, it was just a two-day featherweight decree, anyway.
Unlike Richard, I decline to pass judgement on our esteemed Canadian
neighbours' legal doings, and simply state that I've been quick to help
Canadian friends circumvent what they regarded as judicial
overreaching in the past, e.g., by sending them US and European news
coverage of the Karla
Homolka trial.
I happened to be in Alberta recently when Homolka was released from a
Quebec prison at the end of her ten-year sentence. The tedious excess of
news coverage even in good papers like the Globe and Mail was enough
to give even the most stalwart free-press advocate misgivings.
[Sluggo]
How does viewing porn -- another example of "free
speech/reading" -- enable one to make a better decision on election day
or to support a cause?
[Ben]
Since when are those the ultimate ends, and why is personal pleasure
held to be less important those things? You may have to use words of two
syllables or less to explain; I lack the Puritanical programming that
most Americans have absorbed, and can't make those connections
automatically.
[Jimmy]
Now, maybe it's because I witnessed first hand the sort of social
improvements that came from pornography being decriminalised, but I
find it absurd that anyone who is as interested as you are in things
like civil liberties and social equality can even question the
importance of porn.
In my teens (and I'm 2 weeks away from my 26th birthday, BTW -- we're
only talking about one decade) Ireland had a very heavy-handed
Censor's office, which was heavily under the influence of the Church.
Anything vaguely pornographic or 'heretical' was illegal[1].
Part of the downfall of this was technology (satellite TV was becoming
cheaper[2] and put TV out of the censor's hands), another part was
that they went too far -- they banned a newspaper (one of the British
tabloids, "The Daily Sport". In fairness, it did have at least one
picture of a topless women on every other page, but it also had the
best sports coverage of any of the daily newspapers at the time, as
well as covering aspects of the news that none of the other papers
did).
To come to your point: pornography isn't just something you watch,
words can be judged pornographic too. It can help you make a better
decision at election time if you can read an uncensored account of
what the issues are.
[1] "Life of Brian" was found to be both, among other films. I can't
say for certain whether or not there was a direct link between the
two, but (IIRC, which is highly unlikely) after the BBC showed that
film uncensored, the Irish government started blocking British TV
broadcasts, which most people in Ireland had been able to receive.
[2] Every Friday and Saturday night, two of the German channels had
porn -- 'Benny Hill'-type stuff with full frontal nudity, but
'shocking' enough for the priests, enticing enough that the price of
satellite TV halved within a year.
VCRs were still rare around this time.
[Sluggo]
And of course, what does that idiot judge think
he's doing forbidding people from reading the books they've purchased?
Telling them not to talk about it may be reasonable, perhaps, --
there's no right (in the US) to talk about what you hear on police radio
bands -- but telling them they can't read a book that's in front of them
is... paranoia. Hopefully other Canadian courts will view this as an
aberration. Canada has been good about supporting people's rights in
general: crypto importing/exporting, recording CDs, and watching foreign
commercial satellite broadcasts. And gay marriage and marijuana....
Hopefully they aren't about to turn this around.
What about bomb-making materials? Is there a right to read/publish
about those?
[Ben]
Why not? It's the locksmith principle: the people who want that access
will have it. The only ones who will lose out on the knowledge are the
people who can do something positive with it - e.g., the pharmacy clerk
who may recognize that someone is buying materials for bomb-making and
act appropriately.
...............
"In respect to lock-making, there can scarcely be such a thing as
dishonesty of intention: the inventor produces a lock which he
honestly thinks will possess such and such qualities; and he
declares his belief to the world. If others differ from him in
opinion concerning those qualities, it is open to them to say so;
and the discussion, truthfully conducted, must lead to public
advantage: the discussion stimulates curiosity, and curiosity
stimulates invention. Nothing but a partial and limited view
of the question could lead to the opinion that harm can result:
if there be harm, it will be much more than counterbalanced by good."
-- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of
Locks, published around 1850.
...............
[Sluggo]
Let's not forget companies' (self-proclaimed) free-speech "right" to
send you spam.
[Jay]
But let's be clear here. The right to exploit commercially the effort
which was put into that novel belongs to the author and her publisher,
and I see no reason why they should be forced to exercise that right in
any way other than the way they want.
And leaking the spoiler, assuming that was really in RMS's original
(which wouldn't surprise me in the least, given RMS's behavior in the
past), was simply childish.
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[Jimmy] Continued from
