I don't think that's a settled debate. The Parthenon is seeing some fairly major restorations, not a total rebuild but you can see in the photos that new marble is definitely being laid on top of old. It's understandable that people are nostalgic for what they know, but there's also a pretty clear argument for seeing something as it was and as it was intended by those of the culture that created it, as opposed to merely seeing the ruins of a building that was blown-up by barbarians in a relatively paltry and uninteresting battle centuries later. Just think about the implications of your argument here--if an earthquake damages a monument, that damage should be left there to remind us of the earthquake? Should the Elgin marbles be permanently left out of the Parthenon to remind us of their theft? Should the damage to the Mona Lisa not been repaired, so as to remind us of the vandals? I feel the bias here must always be on the side of restoration, provided such restoration does not damage any of the original work.

Of course, some people like ruins for their own sake, including Hilter. So, I mean, I totally understand if you still disagree with me. It just means you're some kind of Nazi.

/Godwin

This may or may not be the attitude of the majority of users going in, but if you are clear upfront about which programs are proprietary and which are open source then people will learn on their own that open source programs are simply more reliable in a future-proof sense. (Much less likely to stagnate without a fork, or to be overhauled with a crappy new interface, or suddenly modified to include malware/crapware features.) It might take them a few years to figure this out, but you can assist in the learning experience by clearly labeling what is and is not open source.

See the examples I give in this post: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I'm pretty sure these objections are pretty easy to defend against. No compensation for dead or comatose donors, for instance. Ideally you would allow a way around this with a detailed written directive, but if you're so positive that this could be abused then it can be disallowed--there are billions of healthy, mentally sound people walking around with a spare. With a properly regulated incentive system and public education about the relative safety of kidney donation, it seems pretty clear that everyone on the waiting list could be taken care of.

"During the operation we had to remove a kidney, sorry, but thanks that you signed that form that indemnifies us." ==> that's nonsense. They aren't doing that now, are they? They would be sued into oblivion if they tried. And when you amend the law, you can simply stipulate that the donor (alive and conscious and lucid) must be the one who receives the money, and this is not transferable to any third party.

A laughably worthless statement. Legalizing compensation for kidney donation in no way implies that someone who walks into a hospital with a bloody baggie refusing to tell them where the kidney came from must be served. The transplant team would obviously be working on both patients and do an assessment beforehand. This isn't Tor for kidneys; this is just compensation.

If the black market for kidneys really does exist (isn't an urban legend), then increasing the supply of legal kidneys can only shrink the black market, not enlarge it. The demand for kidneys is, in other words, rather inelastic. People don't get addicted to them. They don't grind them up and inject them into a vein for a high. At least, I am assuming they don't.

I'll say it again, the average Ubuntu user might not be tremendously technically proficient but they do tend to understand the difference between proprietary-free and open source-free. Many of them probably don't grasp all of the ramifications of that distinction, but I will say most of them are at least aware that there is a distinction. So, just show it to them and let them decide. It would take up a miniscule amount of screen real estate. Just because you can't imagine people caring doesn't mean none of them will.

The distinction between proprietary and open source is absolutely massive on Windows at the moment. Example: Free proprietary PDF readers (Adobe, Foxit, etc.) are a friggin nightmare, crammed with all kinds of stupid unnecessary features and malware / crapware and then unnecessary functionality changes between releases and perhaps nagware to get a premium version. The solution is simple: install Evince and forget about it. If anything bad ever happens to it (although I doubt there will), it will be forked. I don't have to worry about "creative monetizing" shenanigans and I will never have to waste one minute re-learning anything. Same goes for 7-zip over winzip or winrar, and for VLC player vs. proprietary third party media players, etc. The best advice you can give to anyone looking for a free Windows program for regular use is to try to see if there's an open source project that does what they want.

The situation is generally not quite this dire on Linux at the moment, but this can easily change. The fact is the long-term prospects of any project massively, massively depend on whether or not a for-profit company has total control of it. If it is true that most Ubuntu users don't grasp this, well, the easiest way to educate them is to put a little [Proprietary] stamp on stuff and over the course of 5+ years let them watch as half of their proprietary programs die off or get crapped up, while 90%+ of their [Open Source] stamped programs survive (possibly in forked form.)

Self-described libertarians can say some pretty stupid stuff sometimes, but this isn't one of them. If person to person monetary incentives are allowed (within certain guidelines), then there are more kidneys available period. Structured the right away, this could easily mean more kidneys and shorter waiting lists for poor people as well.

You do the Ubuntu crowd a disservice (and yes, I was a user back in the Hoary Hedgehog days, and these days I find Ubuntu-based Mint to be a fairly handy go-to distro when I want a desktop that just works.) Ubuntu users are not synonymous with the Windows or OS X user.

That doesn't mean they are all literate on the command line or that they understand a lot of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but I daresay most of them understand the difference between open source vs. proprietary.

This seems like an almost reasonable definition until you encounter the millions of people who seem to insist that golf is a sport. Or bowling.

Try reading the summary again. This is not about whether or not Ubuntu includes proprietary software--it ALWAYS has.

This is about whether or not proprietary software is clearly identified as such. This is useful for pragmatic reasons, not just ideological. I prefer to avoid proprietary software if there is an alternative, simply because it tends to be considerably less future-proof. If it's an end user application, I don't want to waste my time learning an interface that is more likely than not going to stagnate (with no possibility for a fork or a manual build) or get loaded up with crapware features. If it's a driver then I'm a little less likely to go out of my way to avoid it, but I will certainly look at the alternatives if it's a binary blob and I will make a mental note of what hardware doesn't have a good open source driver for future purchases, purely on the basis of future proofing, compatibility and security concerns.

Call me paranoid, but I really have to wonder what the motivation of the anti-Stallman brigade is. His ideas, like them or hate them, aren't negatively affecting anyone at this point. (This is assuming we ignore the fools who insist the GPL is killing Linux; the GPL has enabled access to a plethora of corporate-sponsored contributions that otherwise would have certainly been closed source. If you want to count OS X as a win for the BSD community that is your prerogative, but it is nowhere near customizable enough for my needs. If you want to pretend that Google would have open sourced Android out of the goodness of their heart even if they had been building on a 100% permissive-licensed codebase from the very beginning, you need to pull your head out of the sand.)

Proprietary stuff is and has been widely available. Nobody uses Gnewsense. There is no significant movement to remove proprietary software from the vast majority of distros. But there is every reason in the world to clearly indicate which pieces of software are proprietary... not so we can try to mindlessly boycott it, but so we can take into account how this might affect us in very real, non-ideological ways.

Yeah, sorry, that's what I meant.

If you copyright your project's name and logo, shouldn't you be able to demand that it be re-branded? See: Icecat/Ice Weasel, CentOS, etc. The code stays open source, but SF would have to rename it and give it a different icon and that should hopefully alert anyone who has half a clue.

Lucas can solve this by simply turning the blasters into walkie talkies in the next special edition.

The distribution rights were negotiated by Netflix, not the consumer. Netflix can *try* to pass that restriction on to the consumer in the form of a EULA, but this is a highly theoretical approach, not a matter of settled law. Yes, courts have enforced *some* laws in a EULA, but unlike the contract Netflix has signed with the content producers, the EULA is a contract of adhesion. Courts tend to take a very dim view of jamming ridiculous restrictions into a contract of adhesion. The absolute most they might uphold is the right of Netflix to terminate customers who use VPNs. By no stretch of the imagination would they hold the customer liable for any sort of copyright violation. (If that is what you were implying at any point here.)

So, that takes care of the positive. As for the normative, if you believe that this anti-free market three ring circus is how our societies should operate (with full support from our courts), well, the best that can be said of you is you're in favor of crony capitalism. I'm still in search of a better pejorative to describe such people who not only believe that monopolies are good, but that they should be allowed to utterly destroy the law of one price. "Fascist" may be applicable here, but unfortunately it was never well-defined as an economic system and it has too many other connotations.

"Mexico" is not the official name of any country. Therefore, "Mexican" may refer to a citizen of the United Mexican States (the name of the country to our south), or a citizen of Mexico, Indiana or Mexico, Kentucky or Mexico, Maine or Mexico, Missouri or Mexico, Texas, etc.

I'm a tenacious pedant too but it's extremely stupid to attack a term that 1. is perfectly understood by all listeners and 2. has no widely understood substitute that isn't extremely wordy. I'm not going to say "citizen of the United States of America" every time, and neither is anyone else of importance.

I was taking capitalism as a synonym for free market capitalism. If you mean crony capitalism then why yes, this is perfectly capitalistic behavior!

Understand that this goes way beyond the monopoly offered by copyright (which by itself is already pretty suspect.) If the law of one price breaks down and the producer is able to gobble up arbitrary amounts of the consumer's surplus, free market capitalism is not operating in any meaningful sense of the term except in the very, very broad sense that it isn't communist.

The key words are "by Netflix". Not "by me, the consumer."

There might be something in the EULA about agreeing to only use the service in the USA, but trying to sue using that clause is going to be pretty tough as the courts generally don't allow a bunch of bullshit gotchas being shoved in contracts of adhesion. (And revoking the right to use a product you've paid for the moment you step foot in another country is a pretty big gotcha.)