We are Borg, hear us Roar

"Free" software zealots sitting in their basements consider themselves part of a collective hive mind. They like to use the word "we" a lot, and they don't seem to mind when others (who don't even know they exist), speak for them. The rational for this is that the fringe extremists would like to be more than a tiny minority of the open source world, but most aren't, so live in delusional fantasy worlds where they have substantial influence. Unfortunately, there are a few kernel developers who do have influence and have harrassed hardware manufacturers claiming they can't write closed source drivers and such. 99% of desktop linux users don't care if Nvidia and ATI drivers are closed source, but the 1% of those that do aren't happy with you not caring. In the zealot world, there is no room for dissension, and they would rather have the open source desktop fail to be competitive than not have some C code they wouldn't know what to do with if even if they could get their grubby mitts on it.

Comedy Gold Jerry: Stallman, Tinfoil Hats, and the UN

You just can't make this stuff up. I was perusing Slashdork and came across this. The gist of it is that Richard Stallman didn't like his RFID badge, was wrapping it up with tinfoil, and thus got into it with some Tunisian/UN security forces and actually got detained for a couple hours. The theatrics were effective enough that it got play on /.

I actually agree with Stallman's view on this. RFID tags are a bit creepy in a slippery-slope kind of way. It's too bad that he can't take this small bit of libertarianism and reconsider his other political views in a broader context. Maybe he'll realize that these UN types are the exact kind of statists that love RFID technology.

The side issue that I found interesting was, according to Peren's blog, Stallman and Bruce Perens were officially representing the UN, and had UN development IDs. I wonder if the UN autocrat that came up with that idea had ever taken a look at Stallman. Microsoft must love it when a hygenically challenged, Charles Manson-looking guy is up on stage at a UN event espousing the greatness of "free" software.

The other funny thing is Perens calling himself "an open source leader". Stallman, yeah (even though he would call it the free software movement and probably hurts open source as much as he helps) and Linus Torvalds, but Bruce Perens? I guess you can't stop anybody from self-anointed....or in this case UN anointed.

The US retains control of the internet

There's no real news here. The outcome was inevitable. The whiny europeans and fascist regimes didn't really have any leverage. It looks like the US gave the toddlers a pacifier by creating a non-binding commission or some other crap that is useless.

I was following the discussion over at ars. Ars actually has adults discussing things at a pretty high level for most topics unlike some other places *cough* osnews. Of course some maniac, leftist extremist threw a tantrum and had to be scolded by a moderator.

The more interesting comment was made by a Swede though:

Other than this, I say that incompetence seems to be a general trait of bureaucrasy. When ever there is a government involved there is bureaucrasy. However I'd rather see the worlds nations come together in incompetence than to see only the americans get in on the fun. And no, I don't see any direct problems with how it's been run; aside from general incompetence from ICANN. But that's to be expected.

So instead of having things the way they are now (which is pretty good), this guy would rather have everything be completely fucked up just for the sake that "America doesn't get to have all the fun".

That pretty much sums up leftist ideology. Instead of trying to bring people up the leftist always wants to bring people down into the sewer. Now unfortunately there are millions and millions of people in the world that think this way. Who knows why they do - indoctrination by school, the media, the government are probably the major reasons, but clearly these people think emotionally and not logically and that's what makes them so dangerous.

Hitler and Stalin blamed the jews for their problems, now it looks like the fascist left is blaming America for everything.

Internet politics

The fascists at the UN are back to trying to grab control of the Internet again. Of course, Slashdot and OSNews ran with it and the usual suspects of weak-minded, socialist, anti-american europeans, canadians, and others thought it was such a great idea.

Of course their rabid, anti-americanism blinds them from any sense of rational thinking. This time the meeting was held in Tunisia of all places and The Register had another interesting story about the free speech angle to all of this.

Do these western idiots that support this crap ever stop and think why countries like China, Cuba, and Venezuela like the UN taking control? Of course not, if it's against the US then it must be good.

So what's the real take on all of this. This is easy - censorship and taxation. And maybe it's not really a surprise that Canadians and Europeans are all gung-ho for this. They don't have free speech like the US knows. It's not in their constitution and place like Canada, France, the UK, and Germany all have some pretty draconian anti-free speech laws under the guise of "hate speech" - yeah, nice one, call it hate speech and how could anybody be against it. And of course with America pretty much being sick and tired of the idiot antics of the UN this would be a great move for the UN to steal some money from everybody.

The administration will have no part of it. Who knows what Al Gore would have done. He probably would have been against it just for the mere fact that "he invented it".

More Americans need to wake up and recognize the hordes of fascists, socialists, and communists that are still sliming all over the planet even after the cold war is over.

Binary Drivers and Myopic Zealot Groupthink

Politics rear its ugly head again and once again prove that zealotry will be the downfall of Linux. Sun must just laugh their asses off when they read crap like this. In typical delusional zealotry, the idiots think that they can force hardware manufacturers to open up their drivers. Of course they can't and haven't, as can be seen with Nvidia and ATI, but that won't stop them from shooting themselves in the foot and ruining any chance of Linux becoming mainstream on the desktop.

With Apple possibly shipping Intel boxes sooner than people had thought, the idea of LotD becoming mainstream is all but gone. When will the zealots get it through their head that they are meaningless and they will just be laughed at. Oh, never...they are zealots.

European bitterness

There's lots of European bitterness and sniping over the news that Novell is standardizing on Gnome for their desktop. Here is the Slashdot coverage story and here is the osnews coverage of the story.

This isn't surprising considering Europe's socialistic tendencies and significant hatred for the US, as well as KDE being German and Qt being Norwegian. This also happened when the Novell acquisition of Suse occured, but now that the move to Gnome has officially happened there's even more whining. So the europeans are always good for a laugh, but unfortunately its really too little too late.

There should have been a standard desktop for linux years and years ago. Zealots can scream choice all they want, but that won't change the fact that the LotD(Linux on the Desktop) hype is all but over. Some governments and some businesses will use (I would presume mostly for OpenOffice and Mozilla, rather than any Gnome or KDE "killer" app), but the days of thinking that it'll have some big impact in the consumer market are all but over.

I've always seen big problems for LotD:

No standard desktop. That's probably the biggest problem. It's hard for ISVs to target and open source will never be able to satisfy all software needs. Having Gnome and KDE at roughly equal market shares has really hurt more than helped...IMO.

Not enough effort put into infrastructure early on. IIRC, XFree was ported to Linux at the beginning of '92, but most unix hackers were happy with umpteen xterms. A full fledge effort from '92 onward would have really put windows in a bad light until XP came out - that would have been 8 years.

The zealot factor. It's more than most people think. If you get enough zealots screaming choice than it's likely to have an impact on some developers. Of course you could never take away choice with something like Linux, but that doesn't stop the
brainwashed groupthinkers from spewing out their talking points.

So now we're almost in '06 and LotD still teeters in the 1-2% market share range, and now OSX will be going Intel which should bring down prices, bring more choices, give more CPU power, and also allow people to run windows, linux, and OSX on the same box..and probably at the same time given enough memory and cpu horsewpower.

So Novell is doing the right thing, but they should have done it sooner and let's hope they realize that putting too many resources into the desktop is just a losing proposition because there is no money to be made.

Well it was fairly interesting watching a GPL/"Free Software" zealot just get hammered over at Ars Technica. His posts count shows him to be a newbie over there, but he should have known that the professionals over there wouldn't be drinking the koolaid like at OSNews or Slashdot (to a lesser extent these days). At this point in time in the thread discussion he's been reduced to whimpering "freedom, freedom, freedom" over and over. You gotta love it.