usb disk, in reverse?

[Chris Murphy]

On Dec 10, 2013, at 1:50 PM, Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10 December 2013 19:52, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
>> On 12/10/2013 11:34 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I once heard Tony Hoare say that in the early days the computer was the
>>> size of a room and the documentation would fit in your pocket, but now
>>> it's the other way round. And that was a good 30 years ago.
>> 
>> 
>> Except that all of the paper documentation you have is a few pages that tell
>> you how to turn it on and set it up.  The rest is either on-disk or on-line
>> where you can't get to it when you need it the most.
>> 
> 
> What documentation? (And no, it's not just a dig at FOSS.)

Are people really free to make choices if they're not only not informed, but can't be informed? Among other things, this comes up with free markets, which require perfect information to be perfectly free. Therefore it's understood there is no such thing as a completely free market because there isn't perfect information (and often there are explicit attempts to avoid and even obfuscate information). So you can argue that the lack of documentation, or existence of bad documentation, limits the freedom of OSS.

Chris Murphy