6 ms·

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom — go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or

by danjoc 9y ago

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom — go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! — Samuel Adams

BoorishBears 9y ago
I've never got why people bring up these 1700s quotes which have such drastically different meanings when you consider context. Like the context of this one being US independence, not a better but less open mousetrap.
- rxhernandez 9y ago
  Just because a certain algorithm was created to handle a very difficult problem doesn't mean it can't be used to handle much smaller problems.
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    Plenty of algorithms go from practical to impractical based on the size of the dataset they're applied to. Not that I think bringing algorithms into this makes for any more of a straightforward discussion than the 1700s quote from Samuel Adams with no additional context or rationale does.
    - yebyen 9y ago
      Just because you can't see a connection between the two ideas does not mean it does not actually follow from that. (It's only a non-sequitur if you lack the imagination.)
      - BoorishBears 9y ago
        I don't think it's non-sequitur, I think it's dramatization for the sake of making using an underpowered laptop, which after jumping through hoops and funding a corporation that's the anti-thesis of what Stallman would want to support is now running free software, seem a lot more romantic than it is. I'm actually fine with someone doing that but I especially don't get then implying everyone who needs more computing power than that is a "boiling frog" because their vastly more powerful machines aren't open. Buying products from heartless multinationals licensing from Google (which is literally as "the man" as you get) then jailbreaki... sorry, rebuilding... them is not some great stand against "the man" "boiling the clueless masses in closed software"
        yebyen 9y ago
        Well said! It's worth noting though that there is Chromium OS, too, although I will be honest I've only ever used Chrome boxes that were machines with real (closed) ChromeOS on them. I didn't "jailbreak" any of them, I just put them into developer mode and turned off the image signature verifications. I too am not really sure that one can say legitimately an ARM box is more open than one of those AMT i7 Intel machines, regardless of what OS you put on it. You can't build your own ARM like you can build your own MIPS. (None of us plebes can legitimately build our own processors anyway, maybe you can, not me anyway.) I learned "how" in a Computer Architecture class 'I' and 'II', but only just enough to give me the sense that if I was on a large desert island with lots of natural resources and the only person left in the world, I might manage to have a rudimentary computer again before whenever the time I die... although I might have to reinvent a transistor and a semiconductor and some other things I didn't think of, first. That being said, ARM has patents, Intel has AMT, MIPS has the chinese government, I'm just glad there's still some kind of diversity because when we're running all the same identical Intel chips (or any of the competitors for that matter), we're all doomed.

by danjoc 9y ago

BoorishBears 9y ago

I've never got why people bring up these 1700s quotes which have such drastically different meanings when you consider context. Like the context of this one being US independence, not a better but less open mousetrap.

rxhernandez 9y ago
Just because a certain algorithm was created to handle a very difficult problem doesn't mean it can't be used to handle much smaller problems.
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  Plenty of algorithms go from practical to impractical based on the size of the dataset they're applied to. Not that I think bringing algorithms into this makes for any more of a straightforward discussion than the 1700s quote from Samuel Adams with no additional context or rationale does.
  - yebyen 9y ago
    Just because you can't see a connection between the two ideas does not mean it does not actually follow from that. (It's only a non-sequitur if you lack the imagination.)
    - BoorishBears 9y ago
      I don't think it's non-sequitur, I think it's dramatization for the sake of making using an underpowered laptop, which after jumping through hoops and funding a corporation that's the anti-thesis of what Stallman would want to support is now running free software, seem a lot more romantic than it is. I'm actually fine with someone doing that but I especially don't get then implying everyone who needs more computing power than that is a "boiling frog" because their vastly more powerful machines aren't open. Buying products from heartless multinationals licensing from Google (which is literally as "the man" as you get) then jailbreaki... sorry, rebuilding... them is not some great stand against "the man" "boiling the clueless masses in closed software"
      - yebyen 9y ago
        Well said! It's worth noting though that there is Chromium OS, too, although I will be honest I've only ever used Chrome boxes that were machines with real (closed) ChromeOS on them. I didn't "jailbreak" any of them, I just put them into developer mode and turned off the image signature verifications. I too am not really sure that one can say legitimately an ARM box is more open than one of those AMT i7 Intel machines, regardless of what OS you put on it. You can't build your own ARM like you can build your own MIPS. (None of us plebes can legitimately build our own processors anyway, maybe you can, not me anyway.) I learned "how" in a Computer Architecture class 'I' and 'II', but only just enough to give me the sense that if I was on a large desert island with lots of natural resources and the only person left in the world, I might manage to have a rudimentary computer again before whenever the time I die... although I might have to reinvent a transistor and a semiconductor and some other things I didn't think of, first. That being said, ARM has patents, Intel has AMT, MIPS has the chinese government, I'm just glad there's still some kind of diversity because when we're running all the same identical Intel chips (or any of the competitors for that matter), we're all doomed.