201–210 of 841 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI. Normally you have GRUB being launched from EFI to avoid dealing with the legacy parts of EFI directly.
I mean, most of what GRUB provides is completely unnecessary under EFI. You can even boot Linux from EFI directly, I think, you just need to hardcode the kernel parameters, which is not ideal. So a very minimal loader is still useful, but way simpler than GRUB.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think Stallman has been unreasonable in pointing out that rape definition is "forcing someone to have sex against their will" but, as per victim's deposition, she was instructed to seduce and have sex with Minsky by Epstein. Is it so unreasonable to not call Minsky a rapist? Even the victim herself points out that Minsky was not aware of her being coerced. I have no real sympathy for Stallman besides his FS m…
I wanted to say exactly this (the first part, I don't care enough about Stallman to have any kind of opinion about him). In plenty of countries in the world (including UK) the age of consent in 16 (which personally I find problematic but there's nothing I can do about it). So the objection Stallman raised is not irrational. Not only was it not "forcing someone to have sex against their will" but if it happened in a d…
Just because you can marry a child in some parts of the world doesn't mean I'm not gonna consider sex with a 12 years old anything but rape just because it doesn't break local law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although I never find myself agreeing fully with them, ideological absolutists who refuse compromise are actually useful as some kind of anchors to the Overton window. They are not the ones ending up negotiating the actual realistic solutions but their activism helps shifting the equilibrium. If your side of the argument is all compromise-makers trying to meet people halfway you often end up giving up more than you’r…
Not when the power balance is this big. Against big tech who has the resources to wear any conciliating opposition down, you think you're just compromising like a "mature adult", until the next time, where you're forced to compromise on your compromise and so on. Give them an inch and they'll take (or more precisely, they took) a mile.
On this kind of topic negotiations are at the political level and whether you like it or not they will take the unsavory position of large corporations into account. A total refusal to compromise can end up leaving your side out of the discussion and end up with worse regulation. Uncompromising idealists just don’t have the leverage to make impactful threats of leaving the negotiation table.
That doesn’t mean you should not draw lines and do your best to hold them. But if the line is already crossed you can still do good negotiating, as unpleasant as it is.
If there are no “soft mature adults” there to be heard, no one is heard. But your point that giving an inch ends up losing you a mile absolutely stands: this is what I was saying about absolutists being anchors, they allow the soft negotiators to start from a stricter position before the negotiation starts. A group made up entirely of “reasonable compromising people”, however, is terrible because they start from a weakened position that they view as a reasonable compromise.
However, there will be negotiations and you will end up giving away some inches unless you have a lot of power. I absolutely value your un-negotiable position, but don’t underestimate what moderates can do representing it in a politically-acceptable, watered-down way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly what I think about RMS, FSF and GNU. I'm mostly working with younger people (like 20-30 years old) and well, they don't really know what GNU or the FSF is. As a Linux user I'm using GNU software all day but for most people it's just "linux command line tools". It's fine and if they do the job, well done! But this doesn't help the FSF or the GNU project. A lot of these tools have pretty good documentati…
Whats wrong with 1995 in this context?
But younger people looking at Times New Roman websites is like telling them 'use man pages'.
I think GNU is not doing themselves a favor in being so old school. I'm not saying they should use (nonfree scnr) JavaScript bloated websites but a more modern look is not that complicate and achievable with free HTML and CSS standards.
Asking out of curiosity, not to be cruel: I wonder if he's willing to use medical equipment that uses non-Free software? To my knowledge, his stated position against using non-Free software is pretty much absolute; but given that medical equipment's software is almost universally non-Free, taking that stance here would seriously endanger his ability to receive necessary medical care.
+ the opposition against proprietary software does not mean that using proprietary software is immoral on its own. (Although you'll find plenty of people who will make this some sort of purity contest, rms is not one of them.) The moral evil that the free software movement address is to be forced or coerced to use proprietary software. The mere use of proprietary software only becomes a moral issue when it results in drowning out free software. Much like the widespread acceptance of proprietary mobile phone apps leads to cultural shifts that essentially force everyone to use said apps to participate in life. (See wechat in China.)
+ The second is addressed here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy//po/who-does-that-server-real...
As others have pointed out, there is no moral dilemma here. The demand for computational autonomy is not a dogmatic, religious belief that conflicts with medical treatment of a disease.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Medical devices can't be GPL compliant due to the anti-Tivo clause combined with regulations of the FDA that demand that a medical device will always behave the exact same way in the exact same situation." What is the anti-tivo clause?
Ok so that requires a bit of history. There's this company that makes video recorders (for your TV) called TiVo; it's not an abbreviation for anything, that's just the name. -- Anyway, TiVo wanted to get onto the GPLv2 train like a lot of companies, but they also wanted people owning their devices to be unable to partially modify their firmware even as they distributed their copies of the firmware onto TiVo boxes. Th…
This is so unfortunate. Cancer used to be something I would just hear other people getting until my Dad got it. The I understood that it was very real and that I can also be a victim. Do you guys know of any ways to reduce your risks of getting cancer? I know not smoking tobacco works. What foods, bad habits should one avoid. What other habits can reduce cancer risks? Are there any prophylactic techniques?
Also not drinking alcohol [1].
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
I wish RMS all the best for his health, a long and happy life. I also know that if he reads this, it will be from an Emacs mail client on his dusty ThinkPad in text mode (no X11 or Wayland) by sending a URL to a service he wrote that will email him the Web page back - a clean process without any using any tainted proprietary software. He only ever exchanged one sentence with me when we had dinner together with other…
I had asked him to sign my t-shirt, that depicted him with a beret with a Gnu on it, in the style of Che Guevara
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the software is just a tool to enforce a business model. And that's what RMS understood better than many others: His software (and by proxy it's license) is just a tool to enforce an ethical business model.
What's more ethical about receiving payments immediately for the job done at this very moment than investing your time and money to build something and receive payments for it later?
The restrictions on business models (imposed by software licenses as a tool) is necessary to preserve the Four Freedoms, which, at least in his view are required to use software ethically. RMS predicted, and accurately as we see, that forgoing these essential Freedoms will create a world where software is used (on us) in an unethical way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice, any tips on doing that for an entire home network? Or do you have to do it per device somehow
You can run your own DNS server locally. I run an unbound server on my router but you can also run dnsmasq on a raspberry pi or something. Pihole uses that. Then you can do whatever you want with local DNS (doesn't help with devices like Chromecast that ignore your local configs, for that you need your own router, which I also recommend. I use pfsense). You'll need a local webserver running to serve the redirect, but…
Or do you have to manually accept your own SSL certificate (at which point you perhaps might as well install a redirect extension)?