> legal distinctions are pointless to this discussion
Legal distinctions are absolutely material to this discussion. You can't pretend they don't exist; you need to persuade representatives and their constituents that the current legal framework is outdated and is in need of revision.
:) well the nice thing about Arch is that Arch doesn't tell you what you can and can't install on your system...that is pretty much entirely up to the user.
To be fair KDE4 _was_ a disaster when it was released but in time it came to be as stable and usable as the much loved KDE3.
The path to plasma was also somewhat rocky (but nowhere near as bad as the KDE3 - KDE4 transition).
I used to enjoy using KDE but I feel they lost their way and are overly attracted by "shiny new things" like workspaces, activities, or semantic desktop - virtually everything being dependent on strigi then akonadi then nepomuk then baloo or ...
The real bugbear is that every time they ditch everything for a new metaphor - so much of the previously working and reliable software is also ditched or obsolete.
It doesn't suit my needs to have to keep re-configuring my computer and software and workflow so I stopped using it.
I do think it's great and valuable that it's there as an option though.
Akonadi was the main reason why I ditched KMail for Thunderbird six years ago. I recently went back, and it's marginally better. But it's still pretty outrageous that a service that only gives one user-visible extra feature (mail checking and calendar reminders as a background service) costs 330 megabytes of RAM. Most of that for the MySQL instance that it's using; no idea why they have to use anything else than SQLite for a mailbox with maybe 100 mails. Stopping Akonadi is a thing that I just have to do before launching Minecraft on my notebook.
$ free; akonadictl stop; sleep 15; free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3934720 1227872 1296492 253868 1410356 2203068
Swap: 0 0 0
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3934720 897308 1626924 249452 1410488 2538072
Swap: 0 0 0
I'm still sticking with KMail for now, though. The UI is a bit nicer (esp. w.r.t. GPG), and mail checking as a background service is nice.
I agree to an extent, but part of ownership is having the ability to rent it out. Without the incentive to extract rent, there would be no motive to accrue the large amount of infrastructure which has given us such incredibly low costs and high efficiency. This has reduced barriers to entry for the average individual to operate blogs, personal pages, online businesses, and more. I can't think of a better time for free speech.
"Real life" is not as different as you think from what's going on right now. There's a reason that you see the exercise of free speech (peaceful, lawful demonstrations) in public spaces: private individuals should be secure in their private property from the intrusions of others into their otherwise private affairs. You can't just violate someone's private property against their will or you'll face legal consequences. Corporations are legally recognized persons (like it or not, established law in US), and are entitled to similar property rights, including the same right that I use to lawfully rent out my residential property when I'd otherwise be taking a loss on it while not living there.
Specifically, though, you seem focused on the rent aspect of the property issue, and (if I'm reading your argument correctly) are concerned that large corporations seeking rent are a threat to free speech. It's strange that you contrast "Real Life" to the one in which corporations don't have similar property rights. You're making an unnecessary distinction between "online" and "real life"; ownership rights extend to everything digital, and a corporation has no less a right to own infrastructure (servers, cables, routers, etc.) or software than an individual.
And why should they? Individuals can't deliver the scale and efficiency that large corporations regularly do. Corporations such as AWS have brought us into an unprecedented time in which there is no shortage of ways for individuals to exercise their free speech--due entirely to their desire as a corporation to make profit from seeking rent.
The endgame of your argument is nationalization. It hinges on some cabal of powerful people doing powerful things to powerless people, which of course we need the government to protect us from. Some well-meaning, but onerous regulations are enacted to appease an irrational fear, and smaller competitors are pushed out while large corporations increase their market share. While you recognize that there is a "huge number of other parties" in the market, you fail to see that you are proposing a self-fulfilling prophecy in that even smaller numbers of "powerful people" will control vast swaths of infrastructure. Of course, it logically follows for the government to protect us again from the "powerful people" when they inevitable suffer the back-end of the business cycle, either by nationalizing the infrastructure outright or seizing ownership of large portions of it through. Or you could consider a bailout of some sort, but we are pretty far from the healthy market conditions that exist if we're discussing bailing out tech companies.
While well-meaning, your argument would result in the exact opposite of its stated purpose of protecting free speech. I can't imagine that allowing the US--not exactly considered a bastion of civil liberties by the crowd on here--to nationalize infrastructure would result in a net positive for free speech around the world.
Reasonableness, rationality, diplomacy, civilization — these are fragile and require the good faith cooperation of intelligent people to have any effect on the world and to overcome our natural tendencies for selfish blinkered tribalism.
An angry and selfish man with power can easily destroy the careful work of decades (or centuries). That doesn't make him smart or right.
Ah yes, "my side is too nice to get anything done." It comes up in politics all the time. I've heard the claim since Reagan was in office.
I've never believed it.
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The biggest problem in the US is that currently neither party has a convincing majority. During the Depression, Democrats held something like 75% of the Senate. When FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court, the Republicans had no ability to stop it and had to rely on Democratic senators to decide it looked bad.
Today all politicians know that government control can change drastically in the next election, which gives a lot of hope to the guys out of power that if they slow things down just a little longer they'll achieve their wildest dreams, and a lot of fear for the guys in power that if they don't get what they want today they may not get another chance tomorrow.
There are brutish, stupid, and venal wreckers at both ends of the political spectrum. There are intelligent, careful, and thoughtful conservatives and socialists. Donald Trump and his followers are not among them. It's only the deeply fucked up political situation in the US that lead to conservatives (those interested in conserving the good that has been achieved) to support a person like Trump.
Political effectiveness divorced from thoughtfulness and respect is not desirable.
I am on my third month as a paying subscriber, and it is worth it to me. I am lower-middle class, so my budget is pretty tight. I wouldn't mind a discount!
Veteran here. Most of us are a humble bunch, but I've met some incredibly gifted individuals while serving... and I served in the US Army Infantry. I would encourage you to rethink your uninformed opinions of us.
In my country we serve to the army for 1 year totaly free. Yes, without a payment. I was asking my father to give me 50 bucks to buy a box of cigarettes and drink a beer in the bar. How I felt? Garbage...
But here is the worst part. We had a commander A and All day we were serving ourselves. We were taking care of the gardens, making parade, straw broom stuff for hours and many other stupid things with very little education. Every day (and night ofcourse) we had service in the watchtower and every second day we were free and we could go out to town.
But some day another commander came. The first day he said to us (he was just arrived in the camp and we were there for months) that the services were many and probably we would not have many "free" days. suddenly we started to have free of service days every 15 days! The law which they were abusing was saying that for the needs of the battalion we could make as many services in a row as it was needed. 15-20 days in a row for 1 day out.
And this is a very small example of what army means. What was the diff from Commander A to B? You can spend many many hours thinking but noone can give me back that 1 lost year with all those people. I know them very well. First I thought that only my country's people were like that. But then I realized that everywhere is the same.
"Incredibly gifted individuals" are always living in their world. I was lucky to meet some of them. They didn't even know what an FFT is and we were serving in the electronic intelligence.
I would disagree on this point, being a "right"-libertarian from a low-income family, but I will happily concede that this differs from person to person, situation to situation. Libertarianism promotes and empowers the individual over the collective, and most libertarians derive their values from this ideological position. I'm not sure if you are familiar with any libertarians in your personal life, but many are deeply caring, rational individuals who have a consistent framework of ideals and strongly held beliefs against the use or threat of violence toward others. I would encourage you to engage with us more before you dismiss us, and I think you'd be pleasantly surprised :)
Disclaimer: Am fairly solidly left-libertarian (the original source of the word)
Collective action is the only thing that can ever empower the individual. We're standing on the soldiers of giants. It's as a collective that humans have developed all the technology that you see. It's thanks to FOSS that I and many HN visitors can earn our livings and contribute further to society. If you want to be egotistical and think you don't exist as part of a complex eco-system that both sustains and enables you through more than just economic exchanges you are free to do so but do expect to be challenged on it frequently. This message was delivered to you via the world wide web after all, which would be impossible in a right-libertarian world.
Hardly. He stated that there is a difference between illegal and legal immigration, and that right now, somehow, that distinction is being lost in the hyperbole. One side of the argument is being unfairly portrayed as a horde of white supremacists/nationalists/racists/etc, because they make this distinction. At the same time, amnesty for illegal immigrants is being pushed by the other side as a humanitarian concern. Both sides are right to feel as they do, but good luck trying to find common ground in this current political environment.
> In North Carolina, the legislature requested racial data on the use of electoral mechanisms, then restricted all those disproportionately used by blacks, such as early voting, same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. Absentee ballots, disproportionately used by white voters, were exempted from the voter ID requirement. The legislative record actually justified the elimination of one of the two days of Sunday voting because “counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic.”
I welcome any other sources you might have showing that this is factually incorrect.
Legal distinctions are absolutely material to this discussion. You can't pretend they don't exist; you need to persuade representatives and their constituents that the current legal framework is outdated and is in need of revision.