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RMS lifestyle

stallman.org

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Re: RMS lifestyle

#201

Post by jongraehl »

glurgh wrote: post #98
logjam wrote: post #38

Stallman's honors and awards for just some of the great work he's done (like launching the GNU Project, founding the Free Software Foundation, developing the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs): 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…

Surely several of these are possible, by any individual, at once. 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.

We don't need to mock vegans, so why should we mock Stallmans? Just live your life and ignore the meaningless fact that they think you're doing wrong according to their personal morality (after you explore the origin/reason for their lifestyle to the extent of your curiosity).

Re: RMS lifestyle

#202

Post by jongraehl »

logjam wrote: post #38

Stallman's honors and awards for just some of the great work he's done (like launching the GNU Project, founding the Free Software Foundation, developing the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs): 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…

Yes. He started some great stuff. I don't see what a list of what amounts to MyFace "likes" adds to that. What matters is the great stuff.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#203

Post by quasque »

jrabone wrote: post #130
gohrt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I thought he had a free-libre cell phone at some point. 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.

I discovered a couple of years ago (when my phone, er, met with a nasty firmware accident) that you cannot buy a phone in the UK over the counter without also buying a Pay-As-You-Go SIM with a traceable means of payment (ie. card). They simply refused to sell the phone to me unless I forked over £10 for a SIM I didn't want. Apparently the French are to blame for this little piece of legislation. I politely told them…

This is not the case in all situations, I think you were just unlucky with the policy of that company.

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.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#204

Post by dylangs1030 »

suhastech wrote: post #139
gonvaled wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I am confused. You say you are atheist, and of a "fairly open religion". You probably mean that you grew up in that culture, right? Because, in my book, the set of atheists and the set of religious people (whatever the religion) have the empty set as intersection.

I'm not a religious person. Hinduism is supposedly not religion but a "way of life"[1]. I really don't want to get into to the specificity. 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 t…

Off-topic note, by this token, Buddhism is even more in favor of atheism (at least more accepting, and several denominations are almost that without saying the word). It's a religion born out of Hinduism that tries to eliminate almost everything except acceptance, peace and meditation (that's an oversimplification, but it's rather accurate).

Re: RMS lifestyle

#205

Post by emiljbs »

krapp wrote: post #174
ancarda wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads, tracking cookies, annoying JavaScript, Facebook like buttons (tracking), inane comments just to name a few. Modern websites are pretty horrible.

Everything but the inane comments I can understand. If you want to avoid those, you might as well just move to a Tibetan monastery. It just seems like an odd, circuitous route to take. I would have expected him to just use Lynx or something.

I think the "inane comments" one is a joke about /g/, they sent him a mail asking him to come and visit the site and he responded with something akin to "I did but there was only inane comments".

Re: RMS lifestyle

#206

Post by dkuntz2 »

dylangs1030 wrote: post #204
suhastech wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a religious person. Hinduism is supposedly not religion but a "way of life"[1]. I really don't want to get into to the specificity. 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 t…

Off-topic note, by this token, Buddhism is even more in favor of atheism (at least more accepting, and several denominations are almost that without saying the word). It's a religion born out of Hinduism that tries to eliminate almost everything except acceptance, peace and meditation (that's an oversimplification, but it's rather accurate).

Err.. No. Buddhism is just a non-theistic religion. It's a religion without deities.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#207

Post by gwern »

auctiontheory wrote: post #89

Am I the only one who was reminded of Julian Assange?

No; I've thought in the past that Assange and RMS fit into an interesting category of 'movement leaders who hold back the movement by personal dramaz', except to be fair, RMS has never sabotaged FLOSS to anywhere near the extent that Assange seems to have sabotaged Wikileaks.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#208

Post by leephillips »

laureny wrote: post #85

Stallman on Harry Potter: > 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…

"Quite the upstanding citizen."

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.)

[0] http://lee-phillips.org/StallmanOnFinkelstein.html

Re: RMS lifestyle

#209

Post by ancarda »

emiljbs wrote: post #205
krapp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything but the inane comments I can understand. If you want to avoid those, you might as well just move to a Tibetan monastery. It just seems like an odd, circuitous route to take. I would have expected him to just use Lynx or something.

I think the "inane comments" one is a joke about /g/, they sent him a mail asking him to come and visit the site and he responded with something akin to "I did but there was only inane comments".

Ah, somebody picked up on that. Although, I should point out I generally cringe when I see a Facebook thread or something similar at the bottom of every damn page on every site.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#210

Post by epochwolf »

droidist2 wrote: post #182
epochwolf wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you sleep in on a Saturday until noon, you'll probably tend to want breakfast food when you first wake up. 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. :)

Of course I wasn't saying that applies in every single case. I even double-qualified that part ("probably tend to"), but you still responded with "not everyone." I give up. :)

Whoops. Sorry I did not read it that way. :)
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