Categories
Comic eric raymond esr koran land mines linux mines riaa richard stallman rms self-healing war wireless

Happy Mines

everybody loves eric raymond episode 51 strip

I’ve got my pre-order in for a set of these great land mines. I asked for them in brushed metal but they only have Ipod white available. Shame.

Remember, it’s only a couple of weeks until Lug Radio Live 2006 in Wolverhampton, UK.

Credit to Roel Teuwen and Gianni Tedesco for script input.

12 replies on “Happy Mines”

The official explaination is that this actually prevents innocent kids from getting blown up: these are anti-tank mines you are dealing with, and normal pedestrians do not cause these to explode because they have magnetic triggers. However, this makes the land mines trivial to defeat – just go around and move ’em. So anti-personnel mines are put up around these mines to prevent that. Anti-personnel mines are the ones that kill kids. But these smart mines move themselves back, making anti-personnel mines unnecessary (or at least having less of them). Ergo, less innocent casualties.

Taken from here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190247&cid=15653208

And you even spent the time to make sure the flag placement in minesweeper was correct. Thoroughly impressed; you must have a lot of time on your hands.

Is that ‘Mines’ from gnome-games aswell? Having one of them wearing the shades would’ve been a nice touch ;)

re spending time, all it takes is to play a game, and I assume one can even cheat or give up and look at the solution.

Good strip.

“Besides being fun, its a nice stab at ESRs “libertarian”credibility.”

As though Eric needed stabbing at this stage! Whatever; shooting fish in a barrel can be fun from time to time.

The part of the GPL that says that someone cannot restrict what someone else uses the code for always did bother me.

I mean, I understand *why* one must unilaterally grant to others the liberties that one wants for themselves. As a gun owner I see every day the problem of “not in my backyard” and other hypocrisies.

However, I would love to be able to say “everybody can use this except governments”. Idiots corrupt everything they touch.

“However, I would love to be able to say “everybody can use this except governments”. Idiots corrupt everything they touch.”

As the FSF itself explains on http://www.gnu.org/licenses/hessla.html (by the writing style, it’s an RMS text) it weakens the Free Software principles and is pointless because governments can either use someone else’s software or simply declare themselves exempt.

Indeed, creating prohibitions because I don’t like the act, such as alcohol, drug, gun, sexual act, and other idiocies of the polypragmatoi, do weaken everyones freedom as I said.

That’s why the GPL works so well. It doesn’t prohibit any action at all.

“Use it for what you want. Change it any way you want. Only if you provide it to others, you must allow them to do the same.”

Comments are closed.