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fnord n.

[from the "Illuminatus Trilogy"] 1. A word used in email and news postings to tag utterances as surrealist mind-play or humor, esp. in connection with Discordianism and elaborate conspiracy theories. "I heard that David Koresh is sharing an apartment in Argentina with Hitler. (Fnord.)" "Where can I fnord get the Principia Discordia from?" 2. A metasyntactic variable, commonly used by hackers with ties to Discordianism or the Church of the SubGenius.

On the splash page for the ArtistDirect chat (which is no longer there, so I'll have to paraphrase), you said that you knew of no profession where the practitioners regularly perform their services for free.

Let me introduce you to a profession that has a long and glorious history of altruistic giving:

Software Development.

Have a look at the GNU Manifesto, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and other important works from the Free Software Movement. You'll find them most fascinating.

There was a dark age in the software industry when companies were imposing draconian copy-protection schemes on their users, because they didn't think they could trust them. It didn't work. The ensuing renaissance has seen the rise of Open Source software (essentially free for the download), and has provided prosperity for many enlightened corporations such as Red Hat, Caldera, and others who nobody thought would ever make money with "Free Software".

You, like us, are driven by an insatiable desire to ply your craft. You, like us, would be doing this even if there was no money in it to begin with. We all do what we do because it is our one true happiness in life. Why pollute your true ambition and poison the good will you have with your fan base, just to line the pockets of your lawyers? They're the only ones who benefit from such bitterness.

http://emulation.net/

hey, i always thought of emulation pages as an "obsolete computer museum" :)
seems like a pretty damn complete list to me, even if the focus is on gaming machines. and i will take ANY day being able to RUN the obsolete computer over looking at pictures of them..
seriously, they have just about every old machine ever made, or about half of them anyway, represented there. Fascinating to look at these things, run them, and realize people--many of whom are reading this discussion right now-- actually USED them to DO things. and they're pieces of crap! :) [braces himself for hundreds of flames from angered PDP and C64 zealots]

this page in question is for us mac users only, but you get my point.. perhaps some kind person in the audience would post some emulation resources pointing to emulators that run on wintel or whatever flavors of *n?x you like.

oh and as long on we're on the subject i suppose you ought to look at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/retro/
for those of us who find programming languages as interesting as computers..

One needs only examine some of his comments to see how badly out of touch Fountain is with the open source world:

Motif has become the prima facie native toolkit on Unix. Every single major operating-system vendor supports and supplies it.

It does not matter how elegant a toolkit is in terms of programmer taste if at the end of the day the product derived from the toolkit is shorn of [list of cool features]

[Qt/GTK] fails to guarantee any kind of continuance, stability, or development. Compare this with the Open Group's license for maintaining Motif, guaranteed by contract. Continued development is absolutely guaranteed.

I actually agree with Fountain that Motif isn't dead, but his reasons are all bass-ackwards. Motif owes its future life to corporate inertia, and not to any intrinsic advantages. In the free software world Motif suffers from the most crippling drawback of all: I can't get it, and I can't hack it.

The GNU/Linux thing is prime example. a good portion of very important code in any Linux system came from GNU. I can understand him wanting GNU mentioned. After all, nobody complains when they see "Redhat Linux" or "Mandrake Linux" and the Debian group still calls the OS "Debian with a Linux kernel." Who gives a shit? He does and so he says something about it and what's the response? don't sweat the little things or write your own damn kernel. It has far more to do with who said it than what was said. Since it was RMS this extremist element must surface and try to rally against it. Who cares? Call it what you want, big companies do, some people just think that GNU deserves a little credit. So he does it at a conference and he refuses to respond unless you say "GNU/Linux" well don't ask a question then, go to a different event, screw him if you don't want to call it what he wants.

Honestly, I think there is an element of the community that is poised to exploit and as they understand the gravity of the GPL and the amount and quality of code covered by it they see that it is getting harder and harder to exploit it. That's what I honestly think. They label RMS as some kind of communist and this is about as political as I've heard RMS in quite some time and I have yet to hear him spout real communist propaganda. He may be a liberal but that's far cry from a communist, and who cares if he is one? Last time I checked you were allowed to have whatever political views you wished in the US. Meanwhile ESR has his own brand of right wing rhetoric on his home page, and some how he remains with few critics, in comparison, and they tend to be more quiet. Why is that? ESR is sitting there talking about killing people in self defense and his right to protect himself with lethal force, that's the kind of crap that hurts people, I've never heard RMS mention "lethal" anything. It boggles my mind that ESR can say that kind of stuff and all RMS wants is for source code to be freely accessable and changeable and he is ridculed by this group of the geek populous.

I'll provide my theory, sure to be hated since I'm defending RMS. I think that deep down, everybody knows he is right and knows his ideas will win. It's already happening. You can't get a CS degree in this country (the US) with out being touched by GNU software somewhere along the way. Free software is going to win and it scares the hell out of some people. I'll interject my comedic side here: in God Father II, Michael Corleone is in Havanna and watches a communist rebel do a Vietcong style suicide bombing rather than get takin' down by the federalis. He later says that he isn't buying in to Hyman Roth's Cuban casino plans because he thinks that the rebles can win since they are willing to sacrifice. The same logic applies here, although we're not communist rebels, we're free software rebels..

I think the ESR philosophy of "if it can't make money then it must not be the right thing" is the stepping stone. Redhat is already adding non-free software to their "enterprise" product, making the CDs uncopyable. What do you think VA is going to do when their stock holders start demand that they make a buck or two? (don't forget, ESR is on their board and they have hand in hosting a tremendous amount of free software products) They are going to do whatever is bloody takes and if that means keeping code to themselves or even licensing code under a non-free license then that is what they'll do. It's very easy to pay free software or opensource lip service while your stock is high and the media is your friend, let's see what happens when it get's down to go time. What's ESR's "tribe" (to use his phrase) going to do when competition catches up? Dell is vicious, they will stand and deliver in Linux space, they are not afraid of anybody. Maybe I'm being a pessimist by assuming that it will but the economy and this industry is way too wild, everybody has been the underdog or on the recieving end at some point, everybody and that includes MS, IBM, Compaq, Dell, Apple, everybody. They've already aligned themselves, if they can't make a buck then they don't believe that it works, they've said it. More to the point, their purpose is to make a buck. Contrast that to RMS's ideology, he thinks it's the right thing regardless of money. I think he's right and I think that his ideology will ultimately win and that has to scare those who are in it simply to make a buck. So what happens? they speak out against RMS every chance they get.

In fact, the money approach fundamentally bastardizes the process. In a pure competitive environment, all Linux distros are essentially equal, the assumption that it must be profitable encourages proprietary value add. If I give you the source to my "installer" then you can make the same distribution as me and mine would no longer have a competitive advantage. Why is Corel "better than" Debian? It has some code that no other dist has that makes it easier to install. It totally ignores the issue of freedom and when it's all said and done it's going to ignore the source code too, there will be market pressures that will discourage companies from giving their source code up until after they've reaped rewards from keeping it secret; why opensource your installer until it's obsolete? ESR has said all this, early on in a project's life it is far more beneficial to be closed source, once it is deployed and support and reliablity become issues opensource is far more effective. It's like a dictatorship, it is ruthlessly efficient at making decisions and giving orders, it is far more efficient than democracy but I still think democracy is so much better that I'm willing to fight for it. Chomsky has written volumes on this subject, money kills freedom in so far as you value it more than freedom, Alexis De Tocqueville said it, all the communists said it, Proudhon said it, and plenty of others did too and it's a major theme in this year's election. RMS is just a nerd who wants the source code to the applications he uses, what's so bad or extreme about that?

RMS will never "give something back" to the community, because is part of it and stays in it. The same isn't so for VA, Redhat, and others. Watch. You can't "give something back" unless you're just sitting on side taking.

For those of you that havn't read them, here is a nice little link to ESR's page with his essays. Signal11's gift culture idea is straight from these essays.

Here ya go.

I don't agree with everything that ESR says, but on the whole it is well thought out and his writing style is more or less readable.

Rami James
Pixel Pusher
ALST R&D Center, IL
--

Eric S. Raymond edits the Jargon File and keeps a mirror at his home page.

"What comes next in the size measurement after terabyte?"

petabyte.

See http://www.tuxedo.org /~esr/jargon/html/entry/quantifiers.html.

Whoops. Time to invoke Godwin's Law.


...phil

"Stallman doesn't rant off about guns (creepy) nor say any homophobic remarks publicly" ... Just to make it clear. You're not attributing those remarks to ESR are you?

I certainly am, and I thought that was the implication. It is a perfectly fine stance to be pro-Gun, but I think ESR gets fanatical about it. He comes off dogmatic, again what I was saying about his neglect for "first principles." He seems to argue through authority or emotion. But he's not an accademic type... just some Unix hacker, so why should we expect any more? He certainly cannot express himself as well as Dr. Knuth.

The homophobia comment, I think, is a stereotype pertaining to "right wing nuts".

No, it comes from his web-page. Search for the string "cooler-than-thou art fags" in one of Eric's pages on HTML coding. If you end up saying "fag" on just a page about HTML that's gotta be some sign he really doesn't care about how he comes off sounding or about others feelings. Your point about him being a "libertarian" is well taken... from his behavior from the VA Linux deal I'd think he's primarily a capitalist.

I would have to say this is all suppositon. I would, however, ask for further evidence regarding these statements if you were attributing these comments to ESR

Well, my comment was that he would rant about guns in a creepy way. Look at the introduction to his "ethics" page:

There is nothing like having your finger on the trigger of a gun to reveal who you really are. Life or death in one twitch -- ultimate decision, with the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices.

If that, or any one of his other pages, isn't creepy to you, then so be it.

"Stallman doesn't rant off about guns (creepy) nor say any homophobic remarks publicly" ... Just to make it clear. You're not attributing those remarks to ESR are you?

I certainly am, and I thought that was the implication. It is a perfectly fine stance to be pro-Gun, but I think ESR gets fanatical about it. He comes off dogmatic, again what I was saying about his neglect for "first principles." He seems to argue through authority or emotion. But he's not an accademic type... just some Unix hacker, so why should we expect any more? He certainly cannot express himself as well as Dr. Knuth.

The homophobia comment, I think, is a stereotype pertaining to "right wing nuts".

No, it comes from his web-page. Search for the string "cooler-than-thou art fags" in one of Eric's pages on HTML coding. If you end up saying "fag" on just a page about HTML that's gotta be some sign he really doesn't care about how he comes off sounding or about others feelings. Your point about him being a "libertarian" is well taken... from his behavior from the VA Linux deal I'd think he's primarily a capitalist.

I would have to say this is all suppositon. I would, however, ask for further evidence regarding these statements if you were attributing these comments to ESR

Well, my comment was that he would rant about guns in a creepy way. Look at the introduction to his "ethics" page:

There is nothing like having your finger on the trigger of a gun to reveal who you really are. Life or death in one twitch -- ultimate decision, with the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices.

If that, or any one of his other pages, isn't creepy to you, then so be it.

I guess the real issue is, that he's never really programmed anything.

I agree with you totally. All the software that he mentions on his home page appeared there through divine intervention, and he can in no way be held accountable for their creation.

It's in ESR's Jargon File as the plural of box when it means "sessile computer."

It's in ESR's Jargon File as the plural of box when it means "sessile computer."

It's in ESR's Jargon File as the plural of box when it means "sessile computer."

Writing a web server in sh or Postscript is a very wizardly feats. To be truly sick, however, your project must be written in Intercal.

I've been to several NASA sites recently, and I can tell you that on the ground most of the machines are SGIs, presumably running IRIX.

As for the shuttle itself, the onboard computers are mostly 386s. If I remember correctly, ESR mentioned in one of his essays that NASA runs trimmed-down Linux on the integrated computers.

The computers that are used for scientific research are different for each mission. If you read Linux Journal, you're familiar with the Metro-X adds which boast that Metro-X X servers are used on the space shuttle. Therefore we can be reasonably sure that either Linux or *BSD runs on these computers at least part of the time.

Also, it should be noted that shuttle crew members are allowed to bring their own laptops onboard for personal use, presumably running whatever they please.

Well, if not me, who? If not now, when?

fnord!

http:\\slashdot.org\

Try right-clicking an empty area of the Windows® 98 taskbar and choosing Toolbars > Address. Now click in the address box (you may need to make your taskbar bigger) and type \windows\system and notice how Windows changes backslashes to forward slashes. The only reason Windows uses \ instead of / is bug compatibility with MS-DOS 1.0, which used / instead of - to specify option switches on the command line. When subdirectories, device drivers, and other features imitating Unix® were hacked into DOS 2, the Unix-like / directory separator was already taken, so they had to use \. Anyway, DOS is perfectly happy if apps pass it / (command.com blocks it because of the option problem), and it's the default for the DOS Bourne Again Shell, part of the DJGPP port of GNU.

Which is more 'mindless', 'isolating', 'lonely' and 'arrogant': travelling to Washington to read paper books in an environment where anything you want to share has to be meticulously copied in one form or another, or cutting and pasting quotes with links so that everyone reading it can see the full context for themselves. Furthermore, the Internet in all of its forms encourages interaction between the reader and the writer: comments, corrections, additions. I've learned more from the replies to my comments on Slashdot in any given month than from any single book I've read.

I don't read books in electronic form very much. The hardware isn't as comfortable and convenient as traditional paper books ... yet. I own paper copies of The Hacker Crackdown, The New Hacker's Dictionary and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. When I want to quote them in comments on Slashdot or in e-mail to friends, I don't want to type the quotes every time. And I want to be able to refer them to something closer than the nearest library or bookstore to read a copy for themselves. If my friends are as much like me as I think they are, they do far too much of their reading at hours when libraries aren't open.

"The mythical man-month". You cannot speed up development simply by putting more programmers on the job. It's been tried, it doesn't work.

Now in the case of your typical Open SOurce project dealines are more or less non-existant because the focus is on getting the thing right rather than releasing as soon as we can (who cares if it takes another month or two? You gonna pay me to release earlier? No? Well then you can wait). Therefore adding more people to an open source project can be done at more or less any time with few negative effects (since the "deadline" is more or less any infinite time away). I suggest you have a look at Eric Raymonds essay The Cathedral and The Bazaar for a much more detailed, in-depth explanation of why the Open Source model allows us to do stuff that other software models do not.

And if both your parents are dead, my condolences. Losing a loved one sucks more than anything else.

--

I think you mean Hanlon's Razor.

(As usual, because I have the bad luck of reading Slashdot in my time zone, my comment is hardly going to get read, let alone moderated. Oh well.)

I'm surprised nobody seems to remember Ken Thompson's ACM A. M. Turing Award reception speech, “Reflections on Trusting Trust”. If you haven't read that classic essay, you definitely should.

As mentioned in the Jargon File (which ESR surely knows about because he's the current editor of the Jargon File), Ken Thompson planted a Back Door in the login program of the first versions of Unix by planting another back door in the compiler itself. The back door was visible nowhere, neither in the sources of the compiler nor in those of the login program, and yet it was there all the same.

The moral of this is not that it might happen, but that it is possible. You've got to start trusting someone, somewhere. How do you know, after all, that Intel has not planted back doors in your microchip's microcode? Even if you could see the chip's complete source code (and you certainly cannot), the back door may be in the software that compiles the source code to the actual plans. (And even if you can see the complete plans and have a mammoth brain that can understand them, you can never be sure that there is no back door in the laws of physics.:-)

It would be quite possible, in Ken Thompson style, for a Linux distribution, say, RedHat, to put a back door in the version of gcc they use so that, even though they redistribute all the source, and pristine source at that, and even though the compiler bootstraps correctly, yet various binary programs are compiled with back doors in them. (Note that I'm not suggesting they could tamper with the binaries: that would be noticed sooner or later. Ken Thompson's trick is far more devious.)

You cannot bootstrap everything down to the hardware level, not even to the assembler level. And even if you do bootstrap everything, detecting the presence of a back door in the source is equivalent to the halting problem. Consequently, there is plenty of room for back doors even in an Open Source world.

The last thing I want to do is defend Microsoft. I don't use their products, so I frankly don't care how many back doors they might have planted. Nor do I want to advocate security through obfuscation, because that is the one thing that has never wored and never will. But I just want to say that security will never work if you don't start trusting at some point. Microsoft may have failed this trust, now or in other numerous occasions. But for ESR to say that there is no such need in the case of Open Source software is simply wrong.

(As usual, because I have the bad luck of reading Slashdot in my time zone, my comment is hardly going to get read, let alone moderated. Oh well.)

I'm surprised nobody seems to remember Ken Thompson's ACM A. M. Turing Award reception speech, “Reflections on Trusting Trust”. If you haven't read that classic essay, you definitely should.

As mentioned in the Jargon File (which ESR surely knows about because he's the current editor of the Jargon File), Ken Thompson planted a Back Door in the login program of the first versions of Unix by planting another back door in the compiler itself. The back door was visible nowhere, neither in the sources of the compiler nor in those of the login program, and yet it was there all the same.

The moral of this is not that it might happen, but that it is possible. You've got to start trusting someone, somewhere. How do you know, after all, that Intel has not planted back doors in your microchip's microcode? Even if you could see the chip's complete source code (and you certainly cannot), the back door may be in the software that compiles the source code to the actual plans. (And even if you can see the complete plans and have a mammoth brain that can understand them, you can never be sure that there is no back door in the laws of physics.:-)

It would be quite possible, in Ken Thompson style, for a Linux distribution, say, RedHat, to put a back door in the version of gcc they use so that, even though they redistribute all the source, and pristine source at that, and even though the compiler bootstraps correctly, yet various binary programs are compiled with back doors in them. (Note that I'm not suggesting they could tamper with the binaries: that would be noticed sooner or later. Ken Thompson's trick is far more devious.)

You cannot bootstrap everything down to the hardware level, not even to the assembler level. And even if you do bootstrap everything, detecting the presence of a back door in the source is equivalent to the halting problem. Consequently, there is plenty of room for back doors even in an Open Source world.

The last thing I want to do is defend Microsoft. I don't use their products, so I frankly don't care how many back doors they might have planted. Nor do I want to advocate security through obfuscation, because that is the one thing that has never wored and never will. But I just want to say that security will never work if you don't start trusting at some point. Microsoft may have failed this trust, now or in other numerous occasions. But for ESR to say that there is no such need in the case of Open Source software is simply wrong.

(As usual, because I have the bad luck of reading Slashdot in my time zone, my comment is hardly going to get read, let alone moderated. Oh well.)

I'm surprised nobody seems to remember Ken Thompson's ACM A. M. Turing Award reception speech, “Reflections on Trusting Trust”. If you haven't read that classic essay, you definitely should.

As mentioned in the Jargon File (which ESR surely knows about because he's the current editor of the Jargon File), Ken Thompson planted a Back Door in the login program of the first versions of Unix by planting another back door in the compiler itself. The back door was visible nowhere, neither in the sources of the compiler nor in those of the login program, and yet it was there all the same.

The moral of this is not that it might happen, but that it is possible. You've got to start trusting someone, somewhere. How do you know, after all, that Intel has not planted back doors in your microchip's microcode? Even if you could see the chip's complete source code (and you certainly cannot), the back door may be in the software that compiles the source code to the actual plans. (And even if you can see the complete plans and have a mammoth brain that can understand them, you can never be sure that there is no back door in the laws of physics.:-)

It would be quite possible, in Ken Thompson style, for a Linux distribution, say, RedHat, to put a back door in the version of gcc they use so that, even though they redistribute all the source, and pristine source at that, and even though the compiler bootstraps correctly, yet various binary programs are compiled with back doors in them. (Note that I'm not suggesting they could tamper with the binaries: that would be noticed sooner or later. Ken Thompson's trick is far more devious.)

You cannot bootstrap everything down to the hardware level, not even to the assembler level. And even if you do bootstrap everything, detecting the presence of a back door in the source is equivalent to the halting problem. Consequently, there is plenty of room for back doors even in an Open Source world.

The last thing I want to do is defend Microsoft. I don't use their products, so I frankly don't care how many back doors they might have planted. Nor do I want to advocate security through obfuscation, because that is the one thing that has never wored and never will. But I just want to say that security will never work if you don't start trusting at some point. Microsoft may have failed this trust, now or in other numerous occasions. But for ESR to say that there is no such need in the case of Open Source software is simply wrong.

Of course it may be a bit of an extreme example, but you get the idea :)

Yup, this post was definity off-topic. Heaven forbid that someone should reply to a troll asking how he can aviod seeing the troll without waiting for a discussion explicity meant for this kind of discussion. I mean, come on people!

Ok, Mr AC: The first thing you can do is set your threshold at 0, this will filter out most blatent trolls while letting most legit comments thru. Of course, your personal -1 is a testament to when this won't work, but hey, it is a start. The second thing you can do is to simply not read the comments and recognize that September isn't over and it isn't going to end anytime soon. (Huh?)

I agree with many of your points. But if you cared about this forum you could at least have logged in. Or are you worried about your 'Karma'?

The other response is to set up your own forum.

The *only* reason that I am posting this response is that you have posted your points against every story today. When does 'Interesting' become 'Redundant'? And when does 'Redundant' become 'Trolling'? (I hate the misuse of the word 'troll' - check here for the canonical definition)

Try emailing cmdrtaco@slashdot.org before you post this again.

Share and enjoy.

Chaz

I agree with many of your points. But if you cared about this forum you could at least have logged in. Or are you worried about your 'Karma'?

The other response is to set up your own forum.

The *only* reason that I am posting this response is that you have posted your points against every story today. When does 'Interesting' become 'Redundant'? And when does 'Redundant' become 'Trolling'? (I hate the misuse of the word 'troll' - check here for the canonical definition)

Try emailing cmdrtaco@slashdot.org before you post this again.

Share and enjoy.

Chaz

It's hard to swallow the idea in the opening comment that Slashdoot was a high hoop for Asynchrony. The tone of the letter is advertising AND THERE IS EVEN USE OF CAPS. And the token "we love open source" sounded... token.

As I said it must be difficult to juggle the personal tone and represent the company as well. Maybe some training would be helpful.

It's cracker not hacker, in this case. I always thought slashdot gets this distinction right quite well. :)

It's cracker not hacker, in this case. I always thought slashdot gets this distinction right quite well. :)

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.

This is probably a redundant post, but I have to put it up.

Shame, Shame on Cliff for letting this through, shame, shame on the AC for posting this to slashdot.

It is "Cracker" not "Hacker" in this context, and for this nonsense to show up on slashdot, I suggest we do what we have been told to do over the years, send esr's letter available form here to slashdot.

In many communities, including mine, an NRA (or equivilent) certification is required to purchase a firearm. I support these requirements for the same reason I support the idea of driver's licenses.

5. Sources?

See Taking aim at Gun Control for some interesting statistics.

Perhaps I should be more clear. I didn't mean that less-violent gun owners are more likely to take classes, I meant that simply the experience of owning a gun is an educational one that teaches respect for the weapon and the lives of all people concerned. In some areas (including the one I live in) it is mandatory to take an NRA safety course before purchasing a firearm. I am in support of these programs. You should be certified fit to use a gun just like you should be certified fit to drive a car.

1. In the US, every citizen is guaranteed a fundamental right to own a firearm. The founding fathers realized that fundamental rights MUST REMAIN ABSOLUTE, or you might as well have no rights at all.
2. In the US, almost half of all households have a gun in them. It is therefore statistically ludicrous to assign severely abnormal traits to gun owners.
3. Studies have shown that gun owners who are properly trained are likely to be less violent than non gun owners.
4. All instances of children accidentally shooting themselves or each other is the result of irresponsible parents failing to properly secure their guns and teach their children proper respect for them (Yes, children CAN learn respect for things, you liberals have a way of treating kids like emotional and intellectual retards)
5. In the past 30 years, the number of firearms owned by Americans have increased from 122 million to more than 220 million. During that time, violent crime, school violence, and domestic violence rates have decreased.

• Taking aim at Gun Control
  
• Why gun control is wrong (by Yours Truly)
• GunCite - Everything you need to know about gun control and why it's wrong.
• Ethics from the barrel of a gun: what bearing arms teaches about the good life - Written by the same dude who brought you The Cathedral and the Bazzaar

1. In the US, every citizen is guaranteed a fundamental right to own a firearm. The founding fathers realized that fundamental rights MUST REMAIN ABSOLUTE, or you might as well have no rights at all.
2. In the US, almost half of all households have a gun in them. It is therefore statistically ludicrous to assign severely abnormal traits to gun owners.
3. Studies have shown that gun owners who are properly trained are likely to be less violent than non gun owners.
4. All instances of children accidentally shooting themselves or each other is the result of irresponsible parents failing to properly secure their guns and teach their children proper respect for them (Yes, children CAN learn respect for things, you liberals have a way of treating kids like emotional and intellectual retards)
5. In the past 30 years, the number of firearms owned by Americans have increased from 122 million to more than 220 million. During that time, violent crime, school violence, and domestic violence rates have decreased.

• Taking aim at Gun Control
  
• Why gun control is wrong (by Yours Truly)
• GunCite - Everything you need to know about gun control and why it's wrong.
• Ethics from the barrel of a gun: what bearing arms teaches about the good life - Written by the same dude who brought you The Cathedral and the Bazzaar

1. In the US, every citizen is guaranteed a fundamental right to own a firearm. The founding fathers realized that fundamental rights MUST REMAIN ABSOLUTE, or you might as well have no rights at all.
2. In the US, almost half of all households have a gun in them. It is therefore statistically ludicrous to assign severely abnormal traits to gun owners.
3. Studies have shown that gun owners who are properly trained are likely to be less violent than non gun owners.
4. All instances of children accidentally shooting themselves or each other is the result of irresponsible parents failing to properly secure their guns and teach their children proper respect for them (Yes, children CAN learn respect for things, you liberals have a way of treating kids like emotional and intellectual retards)
5. In the past 30 years, the number of firearms owned by Americans have increased from 122 million to more than 220 million. During that time, violent crime, school violence, and domestic violence rates have decreased.

• Taking aim at Gun Control
  
• Why gun control is wrong (by Yours Truly)
• GunCite - Everything you need to know about gun control and why it's wrong.
• Ethics from the barrel of a gun: what bearing arms teaches about the good life - Written by the same dude who brought you The Cathedral and the Bazzaar

so if C/C++ could be considered analog to abstract art or jazz music, with a deeper communicative meaning which is not immediately obvious but which holds extremely deep meaning to one who is familiar with it..
then i guess INTERCAL would be that woman who covered herself in chocolate naked, masturbated using a crucifix, and got her National Endowment for the Arts funding revoked..?

at any rate this is probably the most important legal decision that will be made in the next decade and i shouldn't be making jokes about it..
the ruling pertains to encryption, but anyone interested in emulators, portscanners, mp3 distribution programs, programs to break/decrypt copy/playback/usage protection in commercial software, hacking tools, things that haven't been thought of yet, etc-- or anyone who would like to see how one works, or at least anyone who thinks that it should be legal to create such tools even if usage of the tools would in most cases be illegal-- should rejoice. This is what we've been waiting for a court to say for years.

I'd like to hope that we'll see a lot less now of corporations attempting to suppress information in source code form about things they don't want done.. but, of course, most such cases against emulators or programs such as cphack or decss were pretty damn shaky anyway, and were initiated not to be won, but to bankrupt the defendant via legal bills. So the fact that the cases are now even _shakier_ because the source code has First Amendment rights shouldn't cause a huge problem.

On the bright side, this should encourage more emulator makers to go open source :)

-mcc-baka
http://drowed.cx/decss/

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/ja rgon/html/entry/HCF.html

However, simply because the RIAA in very general terms supports copyright, does not mean copyright is bad. I'm sure the Nazi party had/has a few ideas I'd very generally support too, despite their overall evil.

If you're not familar with it.

Sorry, those are the rules.

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I'll point out that it is my opinion most humans are fools. Humans are not inheriently evil, they are inheriently selfish.

Here we disagree. Not only are most people not fools, but there's a good bet that half of them are smarter than you, in one way or another. Are five year-olds inherently selfish, or is it perhaps a learned behaviour? Two-year olds? Who needs to be selfish when you never want for food? Does that make evolutionary sense? Or is it economoic logic?


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Okay, this is an AFJ, but the idea is at least moderately interesting.. Subliminal advertising was tried long ago in movie theaters (promoting the refreshments, of course). More recently, we've seen the anti-drug poster and situation placements in popular TV shows. While it is regarded by many people as a Bad Thing, it all happens on a fairly regular basis.

I don't think I mind the more obvious placement of items (i.e., things you can actually see for more than a single frame), but subliminal advertisement is a messy idea and should be stomped out at all costs.
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Ski-U-Mah!
Stop the MPAA

Imminent Death of the Internet Predicted!

Film at eleven.

*yawn* This again? The Internet has been changing and evolving since it was created. It will continue to do so, likely forever. Yet, for some reason, people drag out these doom-and-gloom, the-world-as-we-know-it-is-going-to-end prophecies on a regular basis.

Wake me up when some real news breaks. :-)

Imminent Death of the Internet Predicted!

Film at eleven.

*yawn* This again? The Internet has been changing and evolving since it was created. It will continue to do so, likely forever. Yet, for some reason, people drag out these doom-and-gloom, the-world-as-we-know-it-is-going-to-end prophecies on a regular basis.

Wake me up when some real news breaks. :-)

But that's not just it. It's been dead since e-commerce. It's been dead since gopher became dead. (Remember gopher?) It's been dead since when our little network got overwhelmed by everybody in the world.

But that happened at different times to different people. To some, the internet might have died right at the start of the world wide web, when you could point-and-click the net. To others, it might be when companies really started getting on the 'net bandwagon. To others, it might be e-commerce.

And yet the internet is also alive. It dies, and it reinvents itself. To those who think that regulation can control the internet, go open up a hotbot (or any other bad search engine), and search for warez. Found some? Good. Now repeat to your self, there will always be people who won't be controlled.

"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."

Yep, he is. As others have observed, he knows his HTML - it's pretty close to perfect. He has some interesting quotes, too. I'm not fond of the shade of yellow he uses, but it's better than the vast majority of Angry Fruit Salad pages out there.

How about putting up an example of your own HTML, before you go attacking other people.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

> such as the blitter chip - A much more sophisticted one than the simple rectangle movement chips in a lot of SVGA cards too. This could take 3 sources and AND and OR them together.

I once programmed my A500 to run the cellular-automata Life simulation using only the blitter. I think it used 4 memory-blocks (1 displayed, 3 for calculation) and about a dozen blitter operations per timestep. At the time, it was a lot faster than using the CPU (though this advantage went away in later models like the 4000).