Subject: Re: free software as a delivery vehicle for lisp From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2002 21:02:18 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3226683753575092@naggum.net> * Tim Moore | The problem I have with your anti-free software posts is the assumption | that presenting an unbalanced viewpoint leads to balance when actually it | just damages your own credibility. I know your writing skill and I know | that you're capable of presenting a reasonable case for commercial | vs. free software, but you don't do that; you instead throw out | assertions that are just off the wall. Of course we're all "volunteers" | here and I can't demand how you write or how you spend your time, but I | can't imagine that you enjoy protracted flame wars. At issue is a different mind-set. People who do not have the training to work with multiple mind-sets, see everything from the only one they have, and things fail to make sense to them. Being able to zoom out of your own mind-set and see that you had to acquire it somehow, from somewhere, means that you will be able to appreciate what other people see and how they value it. Warning: if you _do_ get used to working with multiple mind-sets, idiots will begin to _seriously_ annoy you, because you suspend your own mind-set in order find out under which conditions what some other person has said may make sense, and wasting your time on people whose brainpower is so severely underutilized that there _are_ no conditions under which all of their ignorant "opinions" and arrogant attitudes to boo can make sense at the same time, and such waste is done in good will in order to understand some moron who does not bother to use his own brain, and thus is not worth the use of yours. It takes time to figure this out. The morons _really_ hate it when you figure them out, but the waste that you went through granting good-will and a desire to understand the moron _could_ have been spent on thinking human beings. To people who have only their own mind-set and are not conscious of how they got to it, there is no waste of time, because they think "wrong" long before they understand what is going on. Intelligence is usually a great time-saver, but in this particular case, stupidity provides by far the quickest short-cut from observation to conclusion. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.