I didn't know isolating the essential principle behind what you said (whether you realize it or not) is misinterpreting what you wrote and throwing back something that makes utterly no sense to this conversation.
If you think you are isolating "the essential principle" of what I'm saying, you're not. You're simply distorting my argument to recognizability, then creating an argument against that.
One of the most common arguments against IP is that it prevents people from using their physical property however they want. IE, copyright prevents you from using your paper and ink however you want. But the truth is, you don't have a right to violate someone's rights. The proper justification for property rights, including intellectual property rights, is that people have the right to be the beneficiaries of their actions. Including people who create an abstract value such as a song or software or an invention, a hardware design.
Copyright protects ownership of ideas, not physical objects. When I purchase a piece of hardware, I have every right to make it operate as I see fit. Apparently law sees it that way.
I already know the principle you're pushing, and I know how it's wrong. It's not my fault that you think in isolated concretes rather than principles and essences derived from the facts of reality.
You know, coming from someone who states that they believe 99% of PUBLISHED (as in, peer-reviewed, not published on some blog) climate scientists are wrong that human beings are very significantly and potentially irreversibly changing climate, "principles and essences (wuht?) derived from the facts of reality" might not be the best phrasing for you to use, sadly.
Granted I enjoyed using the terminal for everything and it's rewarding to break your system and then single-handedly fix it again. But in the end Windows is less of a headache. Windows 7 on an SSD, oh goodness it's so nice. I don't have to do two hours of research every time I want to get a game to work on WinE. And when Ubuntu gave me an upgrade to X that didn't support fglrx and took away the option to downgrade back to the version that worked, I was done with them.
That's what you get trying to use Linux with an ATI GPU. :) Sorry, but the argument that Windows is less of a headache is very wrong. Linux is what you put into it. I've been using it since it came out as 2 floppies on ftp://nic.funet.fi, and pretty nonstop since. The beauty of Linux is that everything is interchangeable. If you know how it works, it's very easy to make it do what you want. The inelegance of Linux is that everything is interchangeable. Lots of components written by different authors with differing ideas of how files are organized, config syntax and so on.
Windows does have some stability benefits - self-healing is a big one that Linux distros generally (universally?) lack. On the other hand, if you've ever dealt with a corrupted registry or if Windows for some inexplicable reason stops booting, or driver issues, or whatever - you're largely closed off from solving the problem yourself. Quite literally, Windows seems elegant and simple from the front-end but architecturally, it's a bit of a mess, layers of crufty APIs, bad design and greedy vendors.
Drivers, for instance... You buy a new printer, the software installs a few 100MB worth of crap you don't want. Even a webcam requires a 60MB driver file. 99.9% of that is garbage you don't want, .1% is driver. Now, take any of 10s of thousands of peripherals and plug that into a PC running Linux a basic 700MB Linux distro. It will recognize almost any device you plug in instantly, and begin using it transparently. That is simply because most products use common chipsets, and Linux needs only one chipset driver to support dozens or hundreds of products. Windows drivers are by vendor ID and in many cases will not work on 64-bit Windows or even for some artificial reasons. (i.e. vendor trying to resell you "enhanced" versions of the same product)
I don't know about you but I only have a finite amount of time on this planet and profit motivation of others should not get in the way of MY LIBERTY in having the piece of hardware work right for me. This plug-and-play aspect of Linux would not exist, like many other things, if the industry were guided purely by profit. Profit only drives a specific class of innovation, and worse, stifles others, and you can sum this up very squarely by looking at the entire history of Microsoft. Oh, but think of how *wonderful* society would be if it were all managed the same way AT&T, Verizon and Sprint provide data service - but without government regulation. Libertarianism is nutty.
If you want to go holding one person's contribution over the heads of everyone in society to justify the superiority of your morality...
Interesting Torvalds quote, but just because he uses the word "selfish" doesn't mean he's contradicting Stallman in any way. In fact, he isn't. Stallman started GNU precisely because he believed people need the freedom to "selfishly" fix bugs in software that vendors might have no motivation to do so. That's pretty much it. You already bought hardware, why should software hold you hostage from what you need to get done as efficiently and securely as possible?
Although, if you want to really pick Stallman's argument apart here, it's the superficial distinction between hardware and software - since hardware is itself a form of software (not merely firmware but microcode, and HDL at a lower-level) and the same bugs & security backdoors can (and have) exist inside an integrated circuit.
Consensus does not equal truth. Correspondence to reality does. The reason there's such a big consensus is because environmentalism is popular.
You don't understand science.
Environmentalist scientists, as was demonstrated by the leaked e-mails, tend to A: start from a conclusion and work backwards, cherry-picking and fudging the evidence to fit their pre-formed conclusion, and B: believe the ends justify the means. IE, it's okay to be dishonest because we're working for the "greater good".
Okay, you fail. Thoroughly debunked. The "leaked e-mails" were from a discussion list involving a lot of scientists, scientists who naturally disagree and cherry-pick each other arguments just like we are doing here, and are pretty much EXACTLY what you'd expect on any discussion list involving scientists and researchers (I should know, I used to maintain several big ones - Ray Kurzweil was involved on one)
But the fact that you formed an opinion without even looking at these leaked e-mails nor any of the science behind climate change suggests you form opinions without "correspondence to reality" - at all. Not even based on reality. Not even resembling reality in any vague kind of way. Why not go and actually read them?
And after you do that, how about go read the leaked mail from the Heartland Institute?
The part about paying off $100,000 to gov officials and $300,000 to climate change skeptics is particularly cute. Also, this was the same "thinktank" that spent the 90's similarly trying to convince the public that smoking doesn't cause cancer. Do you believe smoking does not cause cancer, too?
If you think you are isolating "the essential principle" of what I'm saying, you're not. You're simply distorting my argument to recognizability, then creating an argument against that.
Copyright protects ownership of ideas, not physical objects. When I purchase a piece of hardware, I have every right to make it operate as I see fit. Apparently law sees it that way.
You know, coming from someone who states that they believe 99% of PUBLISHED (as in, peer-reviewed, not published on some blog) climate scientists are wrong that human beings are very significantly and potentially irreversibly changing climate, "principles and essences (wuht?) derived from the facts of reality" might not be the best phrasing for you to use, sadly.
That's what you get trying to use Linux with an ATI GPU. :) Sorry, but the argument that Windows is less of a headache is very wrong. Linux is what you put into it. I've been using it since it came out as 2 floppies on ftp://nic.funet.fi, and pretty nonstop since. The beauty of Linux is that everything is interchangeable. If you know how it works, it's very easy to make it do what you want. The inelegance of Linux is that everything is interchangeable. Lots of components written by different authors with differing ideas of how files are organized, config syntax and so on.
Windows does have some stability benefits - self-healing is a big one that Linux distros generally (universally?) lack. On the other hand, if you've ever dealt with a corrupted registry or if Windows for some inexplicable reason stops booting, or driver issues, or whatever - you're largely closed off from solving the problem yourself. Quite literally, Windows seems elegant and simple from the front-end but architecturally, it's a bit of a mess, layers of crufty APIs, bad design and greedy vendors.
Drivers, for instance... You buy a new printer, the software installs a few 100MB worth of crap you don't want. Even a webcam requires a 60MB driver file. 99.9% of that is garbage you don't want, .1% is driver. Now, take any of 10s of thousands of peripherals and plug that into a PC running Linux a basic 700MB Linux distro. It will recognize almost any device you plug in instantly, and begin using it transparently. That is simply because most products use common chipsets, and Linux needs only one chipset driver to support dozens or hundreds of products. Windows drivers are by vendor ID and in many cases will not work on 64-bit Windows or even for some artificial reasons. (i.e. vendor trying to resell you "enhanced" versions of the same product)
I don't know about you but I only have a finite amount of time on this planet and profit motivation of others should not get in the way of MY LIBERTY in having the piece of hardware work right for me. This plug-and-play aspect of Linux would not exist, like many other things, if the industry were guided purely by profit. Profit only drives a specific class of innovation, and worse, stifles others, and you can sum this up very squarely by looking at the entire history of Microsoft. Oh, but think of how *wonderful* society would be if it were all managed the same way AT&T, Verizon and Sprint provide data service - but without government regulation. Libertarianism is nutty.
Interesting Torvalds quote, but just because he uses the word "selfish" doesn't mean he's contradicting Stallman in any way. In fact, he isn't. Stallman started GNU precisely because he believed people need the freedom to "selfishly" fix bugs in software that vendors might have no motivation to do so. That's pretty much it. You already bought hardware, why should software hold you hostage from what you need to get done as efficiently and securely as possible?
Although, if you want to really pick Stallman's argument apart here, it's the superficial distinction between hardware and software - since hardware is itself a form of software (not merely firmware but microcode, and HDL at a lower-level) and the same bugs & security backdoors can (and have) exist inside an integrated circuit.
You don't understand science.
Okay, you fail. Thoroughly debunked. The "leaked e-mails" were from a discussion list involving a lot of scientists, scientists who naturally disagree and cherry-pick each other arguments just like we are doing here, and are pretty much EXACTLY what you'd expect on any discussion list involving scientists and researchers (I should know, I used to maintain several big ones - Ray Kurzweil was involved on one)
But the fact that you formed an opinion without even looking at these leaked e-mails nor any of the science behind climate change suggests you form opinions without "correspondence to reality" - at all. Not even based on reality. Not even resembling reality in any vague kind of way. Why not go and actually read them?
And after you do that, how about go read the leaked mail from the Heartland Institute?
http://www.pressherald.com/news/nationworld/papers-center-plans-anti-global-warm...
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heartland_Institute#Funding
The part about paying off $100,000 to gov officials and $300,000 to climate change skeptics is particularly cute. Also, this was the same "thinktank" that spent the 90's similarly trying to convince the public that smoking doesn't cause cancer. Do you believe smoking does not cause cancer, too?