7 ms·

Richard Stallman agrees to do an AMA on reddit

131 points by obsaysditto 16y ago

whimsy 16y ago
Reddit has managed to arrange some pretty cool interviews. I've enjoyed many of them.
pyre 16y ago
> As the cloud is moving in (gmail, google docs, etc) and > slowly replacing more and more of our traditional applications. > What can we do in order to free the web from closed source > systems which we can't just use, share and adapt as we like. > Can free software compete with this or are we forced to live > in the last century where everything is hosted on out own > computers? I know it might go against the grain here on HN (with all the Web 2.0 buzz that goes around), but why is running applications on your local computer now considered 'old fashioned?' While things like Google Maps/Earth are really awesome, I'm not about to say that we get rid of locally stored maps (or turn-by-turn directions). What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?
- daleharvey 16y ago
  there is a million and one reasons that have gone over the benefits of web applications. as for "What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?" that seems like a solvable problem to me. (and web application can work offline these days)
  - pyre 16y ago
    You can retain a subset of the functionality of the webapp while offline, but that doesn't really cut it all the time. * Google maps won't work very well offline. You don't have the entirety of the map titles cached locally or the direction database/logic. * It's the same with Gmail. IIRC, you don't have access to your archive of email while offline. * If I have all my financial data in Mint, do I have access to the full functionality of Mint or just access to my account info / transaction history? If not then it's sort of worthless. * If I upload all of my photos directly from my camera to Flickr or Facebook, do I have access to those offline? I'm not poo-poo'ing the idea of webapps, I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it seems that most people are too focused on their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses. My other point is this: As we more more and more of our data onto servers controlled by other people, what are we giving up? Sure we can keep backups of the data just in case the remote data is lost (for whatever reason), but what happens when the only means of using that data is a webapp? Then the backup becomes useless without the service. (i.e. I could be offline and have all my financial data in some sort of backup format from Mint, but how do I grok the raw data without a local tool? If all the tools are online, then it's useless (don't talk about offline webapps here, because they can't access/parse local data IIRC)?
    - rimantas 16y ago
      I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it seems that most people are too focused on their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses. It's because people deal with strengths every time they use web app, while weaknesses are encountered rarely and sometime can be prepared for (getting maps cached, etc.) Local mail app can get DB corrupted too.
      - pyre 16y ago
        > It's because people deal with strengths every time they use web app, while weaknesses are encountered rarely and sometime can be prepared for (getting maps cached, etc.) That's not necessarily an excuse. People don't deal with total system failure on a daily basis, but that's not an excuse to poo-poo'ing the idea of having a backup plan that is tried and tested. Also, I'm not saying that people shouldn't use WebApps, but the idea that the industry is going to completely get rid of locally run applications in favor of doing 100% of your work and data storage 'in the cloud' is short-sighted if we are ignoring the weaknesses of such an approach, no?
      - loup-vaillant 16y ago
        You're right, but such an attitude can lead to a global risk: when Google (Gmail, Blogger, Youtube) is down, everyone shuts up. When they burn, everyone lose their memory. And I didn't mentioned the temptations associated with massive centralization yet…
    - blinks 16y ago
      Minor correction: Gmail has an offline mode that gives archive access. Personally, I use my web apps for backup already -- images go on Picasa so I don't have to worry about whether my local drive is going to die or not. (I already have Time Machine configured, but that's mostly for music.)
- gamache 16y ago
  It's considered old-fashioned because in the olden days, you didn't really have a choice. Programs started on mainframe systems (client/server with a very dumb client) then moved to PCs once they had enough horsepower. For most applications, a network architecture was just not feasible. About the same time the Web was spinning up, network bandwidth and computer performance both started to drop in price, giving software designers the option of retaining a portion of the processing on their end. While it does not replace the standalone desktop app, a "cloud" app affords many advantages which are too great to ignore. (Compare Google Maps to the Road Atlas CD-ROM.) You make a good point about "what happens when we're offline". We suddenly can't use those awesome cloud apps, but that's the nature of the game -- these apps do things which are just impossible for a standalone app to do. Networking is the price of admission. I hope we'll see a popularization (commercialization?) of mesh networking in the not-too-distant future. Pervasive mesh networking becomes more and more feasible as we have more and more wireless devices around us, and while it comes with its own set of unique technical constraints, it would go a long way to achieve a self-healing network at its outer edges.
  - count 16y ago
    WIth 3G GSM and Wifi, there is hardly a time when a modern American would not be able to be 'online' but be able to use a phone/pad/laptop/whatever. The only time in recent memory I can recall NOT having on-demand, relatively high speed internet access (or cloud access if you will) is during takeoff/landing on a flight. I wasn't allowed to use my gear then ANYWAYS.
    - obsaysditto 16y ago
      that's great and all but that's not everyone. Often, especially while skiing or taking road trips far away from a major city I can have horrible service if not none at all
    - pyre 16y ago
      I'm sure you can look at a coverage map and see that 3G service does not cover 100% of the continental USA let alone the world. Just because you live in a city (or major metropolitan area) doesn't mean that it's the only way of living. It's like talking about how easy it is for Americans to get a variety of foreign foods nowadays because you happen to live in an area that has a diversity of people and food markets, while ignoring that there are places in America where those foods aren't in enough of a demand to make a speciality store feasible (or profitable enough for a major supermarket chain to carry them). [i.e. Just because you live in an apartment above an Indian food restaurant doesn't mean that it's just as easy for someone on the other side of town to get the same food from the same restaurant. -or- "It's sooo easy to get good organic food these days for all Americans, you just have to go to a Whole Foods! What? Whole Foods aren't in every city in America?"]
- motters 16y ago
  > What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection? This is a good point, and you can be certain that in any future wars/conflicts disabling "the cloud" will be a primary objective. My advice would be to by all means make use of cloud based services, but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important.
  - pyre 16y ago
    > but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important. One of my points is that operating on this local data becomes impossible if we make it so that all of our computers are thin-clients to the cloud (which is what I think a lot of people are pining for).
    - motters 16y ago
      In that scenario the user is totally disempowered and at the mercy of unaccountable masters. It's that sort of tyranny over users that Apple played upon with its original 1984 ad.
- coderdude 16y ago
  IMO a better question is why does every Web app now qualify as being "in the cloud?" Cloud computing started off (if I remember correctly) as being related to on-demand servers (coined around the time Amazon EC2 was released?). Now it's like everything is the cloud. Like the Web turned into the sky.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    As soon as being "in the cloud" became progressive and good, everyone who could spin it began billing their services as "cloud-based". Use as a marketing buzzword transformed it's colloquial meaning.
  - djb_hackernews 16y ago
    I've caught one of our sales guys during a pitch describe our webapp (which is our product) that "we use cloud computing, so there is no software that you need to download to use our service"
  - sp332 16y ago
    "The cloud" was originally a metaphor for the Internet between you and the server you were actually talking to. You know, routers, various ISP's backbones, DNS servers, BGP etc, basically the part of the Internet that you don't have to care about to get your work done. There was some talk, at least a decade ago, that data and/or computation could be extended into the "cloud" as well. For example, instead of asking a specific server for a specific file, you just ask "the cloud" for some information. It's an extension of "the part of the internet you don't have to care about to get your work done" to include location and ownership of disks and CPUs. It's pretty much come true, with distributed computing and peer-to-peer networks.
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
      > It's pretty much come true, with distributed computing and peer-to-peer networks. That is the "good" cloud. The "buzzword" cloud, however, is much more about centralized computing and client-server networks. In other words, about many helpless customers being dependent on a few, powerful, corporations.
- scorpion032 16y ago
  Diehard4
- JadeNB 16y ago
  I think that there's another important point, which wasn't directly addressed in your post, and doesn't seem to have cropped up at all in the follow-up: Relying on web-based services involves trust in a much more serious way than any desktop application. (This occurred to me when I read someone else's comments below about relying on web-based back-up for a photo collection.) First, I have to trust companies not to be nefarious; second, I have to ‘trust’ them not to fold, or simply decide to stop providing their SaaS. I think it's clear that it's naïve to expect companies not to act nefariously, or, even if we impute to them endless goodwill, not to make mistakes that expose our personal information (cough Facebook cough); and, even if we trust both intention and ability, if everything is on someone else's servers, then there's not a lot you can do if you show up one day to find those servers are no longer serving. This, more than problems with connectivity (which presumably will be resolved after some growth pains), is what really frightens me about the whole-sale rush to online applications. I want to have my resources on my computer—preferably only on my computer; and, while most current services offer some way to do this, it's clear that it's regarded as less and less important, and I fear that it won't be long before it goes away entirely.
- Devilboy 16y ago
  Why are candles old fashioned? Sure electric lights are convenient but what do you do if there's a power failure?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - staunch 16y ago
    http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-Family-Size-LED-Lantern/dp/B00168QAGS http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-Family-Size-LED-Lantern/dp/B00... An LED Lantern. Superior in almost every way.
    - pyre 16y ago
      Except in the "I can make it myself" survivalist way. ;)
  - Avshalom 16y ago
    You light a candle. What's the back up plan when all your applications are online and your internet cuts out. Even if you have the data backed up on your computer what use is it if you have no way of interacting with it.
    - Devilboy 16y ago
      I was being sarcastic! My internet access is reliable enough for this not to be a problem. For many people (like myself) a computer is pretty useless without internet already. My email is on there. My work is on there. Facebook. News. My games require it. Without internet I don't even bother turning on my PC. And I'm not alone. Why is this such a big deal when internet is just as reliable as electricity? We don't go out of our ways to have paper systems for everything for in case the power is out, do we? Why not?
yason 16y ago
This isn't exactly on topic but wow, having now used to HN, I can see that Reddit really has bad commentary! Reddit was the best thing in the world when it happened but I'm not missing it at all since I left around two years ago.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- hachiya 16y ago
  Perhaps that is how Richard Stallman and Donald Knuth feel about the web, particulary the (un)social web. Who wants to voluntarily let their mind be invaded with idiotic comments like those you refer to on Reddit.
  - ubernostrum 16y ago
    Who wants to voluntarily let their mind be invaded with idiotic comments like those you refer to on Reddit. Me, for one. So, for most of the past decade I've been involved in building online communities. I've been participating in them for longer than that. And I've seen the same pattern occur over and over again: as a community grows, the members become more and more concerned with what's appropriate and less and less concerned with whatever actually brought them together in the first place. You can see this happening here, now, on a regular basis: "is this really appropriate for HN" is almost at meme status, and occasionally we see waves of blunt enforcement through downvoting of comments, or through posts designed to shame people. There are basically two ways this can end: 1. The community becomes extremely rigid and insular, developing rules and conventions to protect itself at the cost of new members who get run off or never join in the first place. Wikipedia seems to be at this stage right now, if you'd like an example. 2. The "old guard" (who aren't necessarily original or even early members) either migrate away or get over it, and the community adapts and keeps on growing. Places like Fark, where stupidity and outright trolls just get mocked mercilessly, provide useful examples of this. Reddit, I think, is either at or approaching the second option. Yes, there's dumb stuff posted, yes, there are comments making fun of people, but the community there seem to have realized that's not the end of the world. And because they're much less rigid and much less concerned with "is this appropriate for reddit", there's a lot more room for creativity, for humor, and for lots of other stuff that just couldn't happen on HN. And I'll take that any day, which is why I spend most of my time reading reddit instead of HN.
mattmaroon 16y ago
Is he going to email a daemon that answers the questions?
- puredemo 16y ago
  Pretty much. The interview will be text based and not video based.
  - ciupicri 16y ago
    I wonder if the license of the video codecs used by most cameras have anything to do with it.
    - tjr 16y ago
      The FSF has made several videos (including some with Richard). I would guess the reasoning is either personal preference, or that he is out of the country traveling a great deal of the time, without a reliable way to do a video interview.
      - jbrennan 16y ago
        And I would much rather read an interview with him than watch an interview with him (not just because of him; generally I prefer written interviews to having to pause my music, load some video player, watch/transcribe/etc.).
- run4yourlives 16y ago
  I'm pretty sure he said demon. I took it literally. Makes sense.
rokhayakebe 16y ago
This makes me think there is room for a service that does nothing but AMA with famous people only.
philjackson 16y ago
So that'll be ten questions about the flavour of the stuff between his toes then...
axod 16y ago
Has he answered any of them yet? :/
- flipper 16y ago
  No. Have a look at the posting on reddit to see why.
  - axod 16y ago
    oh ok, that's pretty boring then. No real point having it on Reddit in that case, may as well send in letters :/
barmstrong 16y ago
I saw him speak at Rice University a few years back and he really left a bad impression on me. At the heart of his message there are some good ideas - but his insistence on people saying GNU with Linux made him seem childish and bitter. He also went over the time and didn't take any questions. By about the 1.5 hour mark large number of people were walking out during the talk. He mocked one of them. There appeared to be no end in sight. Around the hour 45 minute mark it was just getting rambling and incoherent and I also walked out. There is a place for free software, but I certainly wouldn't want Richard Stallman as a spokesman for my cause.
- starnix17 16y ago
  Not much to my comment, but I saw him speak in 2009 at Temple University and I was left feeling the exact same way.
- Sukotto 16y ago
  My impression of him is that he's so extreme and scary that he makes the more moderate people look good. I have not hear him speak ... I'm only going by this sort of second-hand anecdote of which yours is fairly typical.
- Bjoern 16y ago
  While I agree that his tone is wrong and he has problems of getting his message across, try to see it from his perspective. I have the feeling that he is very bitter about this because he cares so (or too) deeply. Free Software is his pet project and he put so much effort into it. Every time people misuse the terms "Linux" and "GNU" it is a reminder for him what went wrong in the past and that people in his view seem to take GNU for granted.
  - rwl 16y ago
    I don't think this is a fair assessment. RMS's insistence on "GNU/Linux" isn't about bitter or wistful emotions. It's about the fact that people accept names very easily as names, but then have a tendency to accept the meanings and values those names imply just as uncritically. GNU is a project specifically aimed at creating a free operating system. So if you call it GNU, you will associate the idea of that operating system with freedom. Linux is not a project that gives the idea of software freedom top priority; it ships non-free code. Yes, some of the reasoning behind "GNU/Linux" is to give credit where credit is due. But I think it's mostly about the power of a name in getting people to accept ideas, which is why the FSF also campaigns to re-label DRM ("digital restrictions management"), the Kindle ("Swindle"), the iPod ("iScrod" -- I heard RMS say this at a talk at Berkeley), and so on. These names may sound silly, but that's just the point: the fact that they sound silly highlights the assumptions and expectations people have about the things they refer to. The FSF is out to change the forces which maintain the status quo. You can't do that without getting people to reflect on the assumptions they're making about the current situation. And one of the best ways to incite that reflection is to insist that people use names that present different values.
gonzo 16y ago
"Why do you eat the split-ends our of your beard?" "Why do you eat your toenails?" (both live, on stage)
elblanco 16y ago
It's too bad that he can't just login to reddit and answer the questions directly.
pellicle 16y ago
I saw him speak a few years ago. The impressions I got were: * nice guy, but a bit awkward socially * very smart and good memory too * has written a lot of free software, and would like others to consider making theirs free as well Also, I wished that he would've included more technical topics in the talk.
kevinelliott 16y ago
If it wasn't for this article pointing to the reedit post, I would have never discovered this juicy, delicious, and distasteful video of Stallman eating his foot pickings. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ That literally brightened my day. Brilliance is questionable if it means this is the end result!

131 points by obsaysditto 16y ago

Reddit has managed to arrange some pretty cool interviews. I've enjoyed many of them.

pyre 16y ago

> As the cloud is moving in (gmail, google docs, etc) and > slowly replacing more and more of our traditional applications. > What can we do in order to free the web from closed source > systems which we can't just use, share and adapt as we like. > Can free software compete with this or are we forced to live > in the last century where everything is hosted on out own > computers? I know it might go against the grain here on HN (with all the Web 2.0 buzz that goes around), but why is running applications on your local computer now considered 'old fashioned?' While things like Google Maps/Earth are really awesome, I'm not about to say that we get rid of locally stored maps (or turn-by-turn directions). What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?

daleharvey 16y ago
there is a million and one reasons that have gone over the benefits of web applications. as for "What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?" that seems like a solvable problem to me. (and web application can work offline these days)
- pyre 16y ago
  You can retain a subset of the functionality of the webapp while offline, but that doesn't really cut it all the time. * Google maps won't work very well offline. You don't have the entirety of the map titles cached locally or the direction database/logic. * It's the same with Gmail. IIRC, you don't have access to your archive of email while offline. * If I have all my financial data in Mint, do I have access to the full functionality of Mint or just access to my account info / transaction history? If not then it's sort of worthless. * If I upload all of my photos directly from my camera to Flickr or Facebook, do I have access to those offline? I'm not poo-poo'ing the idea of webapps, I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it seems that most people are too focused on their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses. My other point is this: As we more more and more of our data onto servers controlled by other people, what are we giving up? Sure we can keep backups of the data just in case the remote data is lost (for whatever reason), but what happens when the only means of using that data is a webapp? Then the backup becomes useless without the service. (i.e. I could be offline and have all my financial data in some sort of backup format from Mint, but how do I grok the raw data without a local tool? If all the tools are online, then it's useless (don't talk about offline webapps here, because they can't access/parse local data IIRC)?
  - rimantas 16y ago
    I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it seems that most people are too focused on their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses. It's because people deal with strengths every time they use web app, while weaknesses are encountered rarely and sometime can be prepared for (getting maps cached, etc.) Local mail app can get DB corrupted too.
    - pyre 16y ago
      > It's because people deal with strengths every time they use web app, while weaknesses are encountered rarely and sometime can be prepared for (getting maps cached, etc.) That's not necessarily an excuse. People don't deal with total system failure on a daily basis, but that's not an excuse to poo-poo'ing the idea of having a backup plan that is tried and tested. Also, I'm not saying that people shouldn't use WebApps, but the idea that the industry is going to completely get rid of locally run applications in favor of doing 100% of your work and data storage 'in the cloud' is short-sighted if we are ignoring the weaknesses of such an approach, no?
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
      You're right, but such an attitude can lead to a global risk: when Google (Gmail, Blogger, Youtube) is down, everyone shuts up. When they burn, everyone lose their memory. And I didn't mentioned the temptations associated with massive centralization yet…
  - blinks 16y ago
    Minor correction: Gmail has an offline mode that gives archive access. Personally, I use my web apps for backup already -- images go on Picasa so I don't have to worry about whether my local drive is going to die or not. (I already have Time Machine configured, but that's mostly for music.)
gamache 16y ago
It's considered old-fashioned because in the olden days, you didn't really have a choice. Programs started on mainframe systems (client/server with a very dumb client) then moved to PCs once they had enough horsepower. For most applications, a network architecture was just not feasible. About the same time the Web was spinning up, network bandwidth and computer performance both started to drop in price, giving software designers the option of retaining a portion of the processing on their end. While it does not replace the standalone desktop app, a "cloud" app affords many advantages which are too great to ignore. (Compare Google Maps to the Road Atlas CD-ROM.) You make a good point about "what happens when we're offline". We suddenly can't use those awesome cloud apps, but that's the nature of the game -- these apps do things which are just impossible for a standalone app to do. Networking is the price of admission. I hope we'll see a popularization (commercialization?) of mesh networking in the not-too-distant future. Pervasive mesh networking becomes more and more feasible as we have more and more wireless devices around us, and while it comes with its own set of unique technical constraints, it would go a long way to achieve a self-healing network at its outer edges.
- count 16y ago
  WIth 3G GSM and Wifi, there is hardly a time when a modern American would not be able to be 'online' but be able to use a phone/pad/laptop/whatever. The only time in recent memory I can recall NOT having on-demand, relatively high speed internet access (or cloud access if you will) is during takeoff/landing on a flight. I wasn't allowed to use my gear then ANYWAYS.
  - obsaysditto 16y ago
    that's great and all but that's not everyone. Often, especially while skiing or taking road trips far away from a major city I can have horrible service if not none at all
  - pyre 16y ago
    I'm sure you can look at a coverage map and see that 3G service does not cover 100% of the continental USA let alone the world. Just because you live in a city (or major metropolitan area) doesn't mean that it's the only way of living. It's like talking about how easy it is for Americans to get a variety of foreign foods nowadays because you happen to live in an area that has a diversity of people and food markets, while ignoring that there are places in America where those foods aren't in enough of a demand to make a speciality store feasible (or profitable enough for a major supermarket chain to carry them). [i.e. Just because you live in an apartment above an Indian food restaurant doesn't mean that it's just as easy for someone on the other side of town to get the same food from the same restaurant. -or- "It's sooo easy to get good organic food these days for all Americans, you just have to go to a Whole Foods! What? Whole Foods aren't in every city in America?"]
motters 16y ago
> What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection? This is a good point, and you can be certain that in any future wars/conflicts disabling "the cloud" will be a primary objective. My advice would be to by all means make use of cloud based services, but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important.
- pyre 16y ago
  > but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important. One of my points is that operating on this local data becomes impossible if we make it so that all of our computers are thin-clients to the cloud (which is what I think a lot of people are pining for).
  - motters 16y ago
    In that scenario the user is totally disempowered and at the mercy of unaccountable masters. It's that sort of tyranny over users that Apple played upon with its original 1984 ad.
coderdude 16y ago
IMO a better question is why does every Web app now qualify as being "in the cloud?" Cloud computing started off (if I remember correctly) as being related to on-demand servers (coined around the time Amazon EC2 was released?). Now it's like everything is the cloud. Like the Web turned into the sky.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  As soon as being "in the cloud" became progressive and good, everyone who could spin it began billing their services as "cloud-based". Use as a marketing buzzword transformed it's colloquial meaning.
- djb_hackernews 16y ago
  I've caught one of our sales guys during a pitch describe our webapp (which is our product) that "we use cloud computing, so there is no software that you need to download to use our service"
- sp332 16y ago
  "The cloud" was originally a metaphor for the Internet between you and the server you were actually talking to. You know, routers, various ISP's backbones, DNS servers, BGP etc, basically the part of the Internet that you don't have to care about to get your work done. There was some talk, at least a decade ago, that data and/or computation could be extended into the "cloud" as well. For example, instead of asking a specific server for a specific file, you just ask "the cloud" for some information. It's an extension of "the part of the internet you don't have to care about to get your work done" to include location and ownership of disks and CPUs. It's pretty much come true, with distributed computing and peer-to-peer networks.
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    > It's pretty much come true, with distributed computing and peer-to-peer networks. That is the "good" cloud. The "buzzword" cloud, however, is much more about centralized computing and client-server networks. In other words, about many helpless customers being dependent on a few, powerful, corporations.
scorpion032 16y ago
Diehard4
JadeNB 16y ago
I think that there's another important point, which wasn't directly addressed in your post, and doesn't seem to have cropped up at all in the follow-up: Relying on web-based services involves trust in a much more serious way than any desktop application. (This occurred to me when I read someone else's comments below about relying on web-based back-up for a photo collection.) First, I have to trust companies not to be nefarious; second, I have to ‘trust’ them not to fold, or simply decide to stop providing their SaaS. I think it's clear that it's naïve to expect companies not to act nefariously, or, even if we impute to them endless goodwill, not to make mistakes that expose our personal information (cough Facebook cough); and, even if we trust both intention and ability, if everything is on someone else's servers, then there's not a lot you can do if you show up one day to find those servers are no longer serving. This, more than problems with connectivity (which presumably will be resolved after some growth pains), is what really frightens me about the whole-sale rush to online applications. I want to have my resources on my computer—preferably only on my computer; and, while most current services offer some way to do this, it's clear that it's regarded as less and less important, and I fear that it won't be long before it goes away entirely.
Devilboy 16y ago
Why are candles old fashioned? Sure electric lights are convenient but what do you do if there's a power failure?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- staunch 16y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-Family-Size-LED-Lantern/dp/B00168QAGS http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-Family-Size-LED-Lantern/dp/B00... An LED Lantern. Superior in almost every way.
  - pyre 16y ago
    Except in the "I can make it myself" survivalist way. ;)
- Avshalom 16y ago
  You light a candle. What's the back up plan when all your applications are online and your internet cuts out. Even if you have the data backed up on your computer what use is it if you have no way of interacting with it.
  - Devilboy 16y ago
    I was being sarcastic! My internet access is reliable enough for this not to be a problem. For many people (like myself) a computer is pretty useless without internet already. My email is on there. My work is on there. Facebook. News. My games require it. Without internet I don't even bother turning on my PC. And I'm not alone. Why is this such a big deal when internet is just as reliable as electricity? We don't go out of our ways to have paper systems for everything for in case the power is out, do we? Why not?

yason 16y ago

This isn't exactly on topic but wow, having now used to HN, I can see that Reddit really has bad commentary! Reddit was the best thing in the world when it happened but I'm not missing it at all since I left around two years ago.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
hachiya 16y ago
Perhaps that is how Richard Stallman and Donald Knuth feel about the web, particulary the (un)social web. Who wants to voluntarily let their mind be invaded with idiotic comments like those you refer to on Reddit.
- ubernostrum 16y ago
  Who wants to voluntarily let their mind be invaded with idiotic comments like those you refer to on Reddit. Me, for one. So, for most of the past decade I've been involved in building online communities. I've been participating in them for longer than that. And I've seen the same pattern occur over and over again: as a community grows, the members become more and more concerned with what's appropriate and less and less concerned with whatever actually brought them together in the first place. You can see this happening here, now, on a regular basis: "is this really appropriate for HN" is almost at meme status, and occasionally we see waves of blunt enforcement through downvoting of comments, or through posts designed to shame people. There are basically two ways this can end: 1. The community becomes extremely rigid and insular, developing rules and conventions to protect itself at the cost of new members who get run off or never join in the first place. Wikipedia seems to be at this stage right now, if you'd like an example. 2. The "old guard" (who aren't necessarily original or even early members) either migrate away or get over it, and the community adapts and keeps on growing. Places like Fark, where stupidity and outright trolls just get mocked mercilessly, provide useful examples of this. Reddit, I think, is either at or approaching the second option. Yes, there's dumb stuff posted, yes, there are comments making fun of people, but the community there seem to have realized that's not the end of the world. And because they're much less rigid and much less concerned with "is this appropriate for reddit", there's a lot more room for creativity, for humor, and for lots of other stuff that just couldn't happen on HN. And I'll take that any day, which is why I spend most of my time reading reddit instead of HN.

mattmaroon 16y ago

Is he going to email a daemon that answers the questions?

puredemo 16y ago
Pretty much. The interview will be text based and not video based.
- ciupicri 16y ago
  I wonder if the license of the video codecs used by most cameras have anything to do with it.
  - tjr 16y ago
    The FSF has made several videos (including some with Richard). I would guess the reasoning is either personal preference, or that he is out of the country traveling a great deal of the time, without a reliable way to do a video interview.
    - jbrennan 16y ago
      And I would much rather read an interview with him than watch an interview with him (not just because of him; generally I prefer written interviews to having to pause my music, load some video player, watch/transcribe/etc.).
run4yourlives 16y ago
I'm pretty sure he said demon. I took it literally. Makes sense.

rokhayakebe 16y ago

This makes me think there is room for a service that does nothing but AMA with famous people only.

philjackson 16y ago

So that'll be ten questions about the flavour of the stuff between his toes then...

axod 16y ago

Has he answered any of them yet? :/

flipper 16y ago
No. Have a look at the posting on reddit to see why.
- axod 16y ago
  oh ok, that's pretty boring then. No real point having it on Reddit in that case, may as well send in letters :/

barmstrong 16y ago

I saw him speak at Rice University a few years back and he really left a bad impression on me. At the heart of his message there are some good ideas - but his insistence on people saying GNU with Linux made him seem childish and bitter. He also went over the time and didn't take any questions. By about the 1.5 hour mark large number of people were walking out during the talk. He mocked one of them. There appeared to be no end in sight. Around the hour 45 minute mark it was just getting rambling and incoherent and I also walked out. There is a place for free software, but I certainly wouldn't want Richard Stallman as a spokesman for my cause.

starnix17 16y ago
Not much to my comment, but I saw him speak in 2009 at Temple University and I was left feeling the exact same way.
Sukotto 16y ago
My impression of him is that he's so extreme and scary that he makes the more moderate people look good. I have not hear him speak ... I'm only going by this sort of second-hand anecdote of which yours is fairly typical.
Bjoern 16y ago
While I agree that his tone is wrong and he has problems of getting his message across, try to see it from his perspective. I have the feeling that he is very bitter about this because he cares so (or too) deeply. Free Software is his pet project and he put so much effort into it. Every time people misuse the terms "Linux" and "GNU" it is a reminder for him what went wrong in the past and that people in his view seem to take GNU for granted.
- rwl 16y ago
  I don't think this is a fair assessment. RMS's insistence on "GNU/Linux" isn't about bitter or wistful emotions. It's about the fact that people accept names very easily as names, but then have a tendency to accept the meanings and values those names imply just as uncritically. GNU is a project specifically aimed at creating a free operating system. So if you call it GNU, you will associate the idea of that operating system with freedom. Linux is not a project that gives the idea of software freedom top priority; it ships non-free code. Yes, some of the reasoning behind "GNU/Linux" is to give credit where credit is due. But I think it's mostly about the power of a name in getting people to accept ideas, which is why the FSF also campaigns to re-label DRM ("digital restrictions management"), the Kindle ("Swindle"), the iPod ("iScrod" -- I heard RMS say this at a talk at Berkeley), and so on. These names may sound silly, but that's just the point: the fact that they sound silly highlights the assumptions and expectations people have about the things they refer to. The FSF is out to change the forces which maintain the status quo. You can't do that without getting people to reflect on the assumptions they're making about the current situation. And one of the best ways to incite that reflection is to insist that people use names that present different values.

gonzo 16y ago

"Why do you eat the split-ends our of your beard?" "Why do you eat your toenails?" (both live, on stage)

elblanco 16y ago

It's too bad that he can't just login to reddit and answer the questions directly.

pellicle 16y ago

I saw him speak a few years ago. The impressions I got were: * nice guy, but a bit awkward socially * very smart and good memory too * has written a lot of free software, and would like others to consider making theirs free as well Also, I wished that he would've included more technical topics in the talk.

kevinelliott 16y ago

If it wasn't for this article pointing to the reedit post, I would have never discovered this juicy, delicious, and distasteful video of Stallman eating his foot pickings. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ That literally brightened my day. Brilliance is questionable if it means this is the end result!