Slashdot Mirror

Ah, you see, Scientology is not like other religions, that's what they admit themselves. But the real reason why they're different is how they publish information.

Other religions give their religious texts away free of charge, but Scientology decided to give it away through losing a number of court cases, accidentally giving away the the documents freely as part of legal paperwork. Other religions spread the word by choice, this religion spreads the word by shooting themselves to the foot all the time.

Conclusion: What was the Church of Scientology thinking? This move will only increase the number of people hitting xenu.net.

Here's a mirror.

Now that I'm a teacher, I do tell my students all about standards and forwards compatibility and separation of content from presentation. I'm going to have them read this article -- the first 3/4 of it, anyway.

He's right that versioning is dirty dirty voodoo. For a good discussion of how it can be much cleaner and more forward compatible, see http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/support.html .

There are quite good newsreaders for the Mac. I suspect that you can probably run the terminal-based newsreaders a la BSD. I use pan on Linux, but I never had a problem with YA-NewsWatcher on the Mac (which evidently has become Thoth).

Take a look here for other newsreaders.

By the way, IE is the most DOM compliant browser (comparing it to NS, Mozilla, Opera, and Links). So don't spread the FUD.

Hmm for some strange reason, I get the feeling you don't actually do much DOM work. If you did, you would know that you're the one spreading FUD... or at least, talking out of your ass.

Netscape put out a comparison chart a while ago (M13 vs IE/PC 5.5r1 vs IE/MAC 5.0), which while old, still serves it's purpose in pointing out IE5's weaknesses (IE6 is much improved). ppk keeps has own W3C DOM compatibility chart.

Still, IMO Mozilla's DOM support outshines IE's. Does IE have their known DOM bugs online like Mozilla does? Mozilla's main weaknesses are some speed issues (improving a lot recently), and lack of ranging/selections in textareas, however, the DOM Inspector and JavaScript Debugger more than makes up for it.

The DOM Inspector alone will make you switch to Mozilla as your primary testing browser - it'll tell you the DOM properties, Box model, CSS rules, and computed styles of any element. If that doesn't get your eyes to light up, then you probably haven't ever had to do much "advanced web code multiple browsers."

Praise be the Lizard!

I was looking at this the other day for a cross-browser web application which relies on DOM. If you look at this W3C DOM Compatibility Table and run your eyes down the Opera column, you'll see that it supports only a handful of the DOM features listed, and is by far the least DOM-compliant browser. This new version is a much-needed improvement to bring Opera into line with Mozilla, Explorer, and Konqueror.

is Blowin' in the wind

Document on remote applications with X Window System is available here

There's a mirror right here

Just out of curiosity, does subversion have a solution to the CVS's insecure :pserver: problem? That is, a better hack than the nasty scvs scripts for those of us who can't afford to use insecure version control?

I couldn't find any mention of it on the web page, which is why I'm asking here.

XS4All does have an English version of the page:
http://www.xs4all.nl/uk/news/overview/abfab_appeal .html

Can't help you with the KDE3 bindings (except to tell you to Read The Fine Example Code :) but there is an excellent PyQT book out by Boudewijn Rempt, who is quite active on the PyQT and PyKDE lists. The entire book is online, so you can preview it first. He also ported all the code in his book to PyQT 3.1 which can be had here.
:Peter

This translation brought to you by WorldLingo's free machine translation service:

18 July of 2002

The Court court Amsterdam today cut down sentence in the business of Abfab the US XS4ALL and 4 customers. The court destroys the diction in short lawsuit in which Abfab become forbidden still longer unasked commerciele e-mails (spam) to send to customers of XS4ALL, under penalty of a penalty payment of EURO 50 by bulletin. The possibility leaves the court in order continue if in the general spammers to she gives rise to nuisance; "In the case of the type spam which looks after for nuisance, is proportionaliteits-eisen in the lawsuit and can at niet-inachtneming from that it of onrechtmatigheid talk be. "

The court enters vastly on several layers on which the spamverbod had based XS4ALL, namely telecommunicatie-wetgeving, privacy - and (netwerk-)eigendomsrechten. Unfortunately concludes the court which does not satisfy none of these layers in order call a halt behaviour of Abfab, very the undesirable in the eyes of XSÂLL, to.

Simply rash XS4ALL the official report of the court which considers the violation on the privacy of the addressees is relative small. In to understand with difficulty a reasoning to the court notes that then a e-mail address is less given public (woon-)adres, and therefore certain a confidential character has, but that would cause the leaking out of it on the other hand less damage then a real address, because for each easy and against small costs of e-mail address can change. In the eyes of XS4ALL blijk of small opinion in the value give the court those internetters suture to conservation of their e-mail address as digital identity. More certainly now much internetters change, broadband Internet, go up it moreover in order change address strong overstapkosten in order of to.

XS4ALL are disappointed concerning this negative diction and have themselves recommended concerning the possibility in cassation go. The new European directive for privacy in the telecommunication sector issues an explicit prohibition on impeding internetters with unasked bulkmail. The European Council accepted the final text meanwhile and publication in the officiele publication booklet of the EU become thus expect in the short term. Afterwards it the member States have implement still 15 months the time the prohibition to. The court recognizes this and puts: "The problem of XS4ALL and [ the 4 customers ] himself, to himself now let aanzien, vanzelf to solve. "XS4ALL had hoped save Abfab and similar digital marketing companies of harte her customers with immediate entrance further nuisance of, but customers can now only to help with establishing technical spamfilters to the access to keep to serious communication.

More information regarding opt-in the spamfilters of XS4ALL:
http://www.xs4all.nl/nieuws/overzicht/spamfilter.h tml

The sentence:
http://www.xs4all.nl/nieuws/overzicht/abfab180702. html

This translation brought to you by WorldLingo's free machine translation service:

18 July of 2002

The Court court Amsterdam today cut down sentence in the business of Abfab the US XS4ALL and 4 customers. The court destroys the diction in short lawsuit in which Abfab become forbidden still longer unasked commerciele e-mails (spam) to send to customers of XS4ALL, under penalty of a penalty payment of EURO 50 by bulletin. The possibility leaves the court in order continue if in the general spammers to she gives rise to nuisance; "In the case of the type spam which looks after for nuisance, is proportionaliteits-eisen in the lawsuit and can at niet-inachtneming from that it of onrechtmatigheid talk be. "

The court enters vastly on several layers on which the spamverbod had based XS4ALL, namely telecommunicatie-wetgeving, privacy - and (netwerk-)eigendomsrechten. Unfortunately concludes the court which does not satisfy none of these layers in order call a halt behaviour of Abfab, very the undesirable in the eyes of XSÂLL, to.

Simply rash XS4ALL the official report of the court which considers the violation on the privacy of the addressees is relative small. In to understand with difficulty a reasoning to the court notes that then a e-mail address is less given public (woon-)adres, and therefore certain a confidential character has, but that would cause the leaking out of it on the other hand less damage then a real address, because for each easy and against small costs of e-mail address can change. In the eyes of XS4ALL blijk of small opinion in the value give the court those internetters suture to conservation of their e-mail address as digital identity. More certainly now much internetters change, broadband Internet, go up it moreover in order change address strong overstapkosten in order of to.

XS4ALL are disappointed concerning this negative diction and have themselves recommended concerning the possibility in cassation go. The new European directive for privacy in the telecommunication sector issues an explicit prohibition on impeding internetters with unasked bulkmail. The European Council accepted the final text meanwhile and publication in the officiele publication booklet of the EU become thus expect in the short term. Afterwards it the member States have implement still 15 months the time the prohibition to. The court recognizes this and puts: "The problem of XS4ALL and [ the 4 customers ] himself, to himself now let aanzien, vanzelf to solve. "XS4ALL had hoped save Abfab and similar digital marketing companies of harte her customers with immediate entrance further nuisance of, but customers can now only to help with establishing technical spamfilters to the access to keep to serious communication.

More information regarding opt-in the spamfilters of XS4ALL:
http://www.xs4all.nl/nieuws/overzicht/spamfilter.h tml

The sentence:
http://www.xs4all.nl/nieuws/overzicht/abfab180702. html

>Hairy geeks, slimy geeks, overweighted geeks....
>yes! That's exactly what we want to see! I'm sure
>nobody like those pictures [inscyber.net] taken at
>Microsoft's booth, they are very unprofessional.

Here's another guy who chooses his OS based on the quality of the booth babes:

Why BSD is superior to Linux

> And go where?

China? They don't seem to care to much about reverse engineering, patents or copyrights...

> Name one halfway modernized country whose government is on the whole more in touch with reality than all the rest.

Germany? The German government is well on top of web precence of extremist groups but is otherwise pretty Open Source and anti-patent minded.
Holland? The Dutch government is pretty liberal in most respects. The XS4all service provider has its roots in the hacker community and has until now refused disclosure of any userinfo of non-convicted members to any organization.
Then again you're probably right about the EU's intentions, so you're better off in Norwegia. Also, don't forget that in Europe patent lawsuits - or lawsuits in general - are less common than in the US. Most disputes are solved by common sense, rather than big bucks.

> >So when the government will eventually discover the DMCA was a counter- innovative idea, I suppose they'd get rid of it, right?!?

> Hahaha, oh, that's a good one. [...] Exhibit A [...] Exhibit B

I meant that as a joke, but thanks for refreshing my memory. My rherorical question was meant to point out how a capitalistic democratic society still manages to fuck up its free market. I bet that once a government funded anti-cyberterrorism BSA-alike organization has come into place, it will take a couple of centuries to discover/uncover what went wrong...

However, if you'd like to give them politicians a wake-up call, then you would need a clear signal. Like a general strike of all university and free-thinking-companies related professors, researchers and students. Get media attention, threaten to leave the country, point out the economy doesn't benefit from the brain-drain. Go on strike, the French way! (Also a joke ;-)

Does that mean that if I link to slashdot which has an article that links to 2600 which links to DeCSS source (or something that is illegal in whatever country), or even any other convulted route that I am breaking the law?

I really don't see why you need a judge to make yourself look stupid in national and international publications when someone links directly to items on your website. When someone was linking to images on my website (where I pay for excess traffic) I did not call a lawyer. I went to the Apache website where the documentation about mod_rewrite has the excellent Apache 1.3 URL Rewriting Guide which has a cookbook entry (cut, paste, edit names) for exactly this, which can be easily adopted to stop 'deep linking'. Set up a nice 403 errorpage stating that linking directly to articles on your site is not allowed by policy and go on.

Does that mean that if I link to slashdot which has an article that links to 2600 which links to DeCSS source (or something that is illegal in whatever country), or even any other convulted route that I am breaking the law?

I really don't see why you need a judge to make yourself look stupid in national and international publications when someone links directly to items on your website. When someone was linking to images on my website (where I pay for excess traffic) I did not call a lawyer. I went to the Apache website where the documentation about mod_rewrite has the excellent Apache 1.3 URL Rewriting Guide which has a cookbook entry (cut, paste, edit names) for exactly this, which can be easily adopted to stop 'deep linking'. Set up a nice 403 errorpage stating that linking directly to articles on your site is not allowed by policy and go on.

One of my relatives had an Odyssey - or, as it was known here, Philips Videopac.

It had a really wickedly good Pacman clone that my father fell in love with. awwww yeah, this was the stuff... =)

Because, unlike linux, it is NOT GAY!

More than five years ago, the German zine 'Radikal' published instructions on preventing nuclear-waste transport by rail, which have since been placed onto the internet. Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator has responded with lawsuits against the original host, search engines, and Indymedia-NL. Indymedia-NL had links to mirrors of the zine, indirectly linking to the instructions, which were published as a comment on its open-publishing newswire.

On June 20, a Dutch judge ordered Indymedia-NL to remove the links, requiring "Indymedia immediately after receiving this sentence to remove and to keep removed the hyperlinks, which are placed on (a) website(s) under the control of Indymedia, if those hyperlinks lead directly or indirectly to the Radikal article."

Indymedia-NL has responded with a press release, stating that they consider "the ruling a dramatic limitation of the possibilities of the Internet and the freedom of speech."

(c) Independent Media Center. All content is free for reprint and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere, for non-commercial use, unless otherwise noted by author.

More than five years ago, the German zine 'Radikal' published instructions on preventing nuclear-waste transport by rail, which have since been placed onto the internet. Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator has responded with lawsuits against the original host, search engines, and Indymedia-NL. Indymedia-NL had links to mirrors of the zine, indirectly linking to the instructions, which were published as a comment on its open-publishing newswire.

On June 20, a Dutch judge ordered Indymedia-NL to remove the links, requiring "Indymedia immediately after receiving this sentence to remove and to keep removed the hyperlinks, which are placed on (a) website(s) under the control of Indymedia, if those hyperlinks lead directly or indirectly to the Radikal article."

Indymedia-NL has responded with a press release, stating that they consider "the ruling a dramatic limitation of the possibilities of the Internet and the freedom of speech."

(c) Independent Media Center. All content is free for reprint and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere, for non-commercial use, unless otherwise noted by author.

More than five years ago, the German zine 'Radikal' published instructions on preventing nuclear-waste transport by rail, which have since been placed onto the internet. Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator has responded with lawsuits against the original host, search engines, and Indymedia-NL. Indymedia-NL had links to mirrors of the zine, indirectly linking to the instructions, which were published as a comment on its open-publishing newswire.

On June 20, a Dutch judge ordered Indymedia-NL to remove the links, requiring "Indymedia immediately after receiving this sentence to remove and to keep removed the hyperlinks, which are placed on (a) website(s) under the control of Indymedia, if those hyperlinks lead directly or indirectly to the Radikal article."

Indymedia-NL has responded with a press release, stating that they consider "the ruling a dramatic limitation of the possibilities of the Internet and the freedom of speech."

(c) Independent Media Center. All content is free for reprint and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere, for non-commercial use, unless otherwise noted by author.

More than five years ago, the German zine 'Radikal' published instructions on preventing nuclear-waste transport by rail, which have since been placed onto the internet. Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator has responded with lawsuits against the original host, search engines, and Indymedia-NL. Indymedia-NL had links to mirrors of the zine, indirectly linking to the instructions, which were published as a comment on its open-publishing newswire.

On June 20, a Dutch judge ordered Indymedia-NL to remove the links, requiring "Indymedia immediately after receiving this sentence to remove and to keep removed the hyperlinks, which are placed on (a) website(s) under the control of Indymedia, if those hyperlinks lead directly or indirectly to the Radikal article."

Indymedia-NL has responded with a press release, stating that they consider "the ruling a dramatic limitation of the possibilities of the Internet and the freedom of speech."

(c) Independent Media Center. All content is free for reprint and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere, for non-commercial use, unless otherwise noted by author.

I want to know where there's a link on any page at bahn.de that indirectly gets to Radikal A cursory examination shows that virtually every link on their site points to other links within the bahn.de domain. I'm sure someone with sufficiently Mad Skillz could whip up a bot to map out the link structure, and find the shortest number of links to follow to get there, with a description that even a dumbass judge can follow

XS4ALL is applealing this decision and they are still in court (you can check the XS4ALL pages at ...

This is why everyone in The Netherlands who cares about this stuff should sign up with them if they can and not another ISP. They have great service, savvy people, roots within the community and indeed, they are with us on every issue that every comes up in YRO. See this page about their views (dutch only).

It is nice to see that even in the corporate world, there are good guys.

XS4ALL is applealing this decision and they are still in court (you can check the XS4ALL pages at ...

This is why everyone in The Netherlands who cares about this stuff should sign up with them if they can and not another ISP. They have great service, savvy people, roots within the community and indeed, they are with us on every issue that every comes up in YRO. See this page about their views (dutch only).

It is nice to see that even in the corporate world, there are good guys.

From the press release:

In the verdict of June 20th, the judge has ordered to remove the hyperlinks
and to keep them removed, in as far as these hyperlinks lead to the Radikal
articles, either directly or indirectly and notwithstanding whether these
hyperlinks were placed by visitors. If Indymedia NL does not comply with
this order, a penal sum of 5,000 Euros per day can be imposed. The judge
ordered that, like an Internet Service Provider but just as much like the
editors of a newspaper, Indymedia NL is, in principle, responsible for the
content that has been published with its help.(My emphasis)

First, that means that if /. was based in .NL, doing this would be illigeal.

Second, the judged rulled that as an ISP, Indymedia NL, is responsible for the content of their client.

I really hope that the Dutch constitution isn't to dependent on Jurisprudence, otherwise this rulling is definitely a Bad Thing(tm)

Murphy(c).

Looks like slashdot might get in trouble. Heres a link to the mag

Maybe it is good to have understand the whole story from the beginning ...

It starts way back in 1997 when the German magazine places some of their issues online at a dutch ISP (XS4ALL). In these issues they describe how to derail german trains.

A German Court rules that these documents are illegal and these publications are illegal in Germany. German ISP are orderded to block the URL to XS4ALL. Because blocking something on the internet is virtually impossible these blocks were lifted because a lot of people started to publish mirrors of these documents.

Back to April this year ...
The German Railroads suddenly notice that these documents are still online and available and through a (dutch) court order forces XS4ALL to take these pages down.

XS4ALL is applealing this decision and they are still in court (you can check the XS4ALL pages at http://www.xs4all.nl/nieuws/overzicht/radikal.html )

At the same time Indymedia plublishes a list with mirrors where these documents can be found ...
and that is now illegal to. They want to appleal, but as always .. money is an issue ..

I hope this helps.

Rigolo

What's more puzzling is why American web-forum Slashdot chickened out of linking to any Radikal mirrors as well.

So Dutch National Railroad, let's see you do something about this.

[Heh - there's nothing so brave as using someone else's liability to make a political statement.]

What's more puzzling is why American web-forum Slashdot chickened out of linking to any Radikal mirrors as well.

So Dutch National Railroad, let's see you do something about this.

[Heh - there's nothing so brave as using someone else's liability to make a political statement.]

Same reason you can't have Photoshop for Linux, or Microsoft Office for Linux: because the vendor wouldn't make any money off of a version of their software for Linux.

Yet you can buy Maya for Linux, which costs just a hair more than Photoshop or Microsoft Office. You can buy Star Office, but most people don't, because OpenOffice is nearly the same quality with the definate promise of improvement. There's also Abiword. Gnumeric is a top-notch spreadsheet program that I've come to prefer to excel. There's more like this. There's really very little incentive to buy an office suite when you can get better for free.

In other fields, the Free alternatives tend to kick the hiney of their commercial counterparts. Let's try a few, okay? Pan, a newsreader based loosley on Agent. Pan is the only newsreader to score perfectly on the GNKSA Evaluations. Compared this to its commercial basis, Agent's score really sucks. Then there's Quanta for HTML editing. VIM is fine for most people, but if you need that Dreamweaver-like crap, Quanta does it without getting in your way. And it's REALLY good. Oh yes, it's Free with a capital "EFF."

This is a silly arguement to make against "Linux." This is Capitalism 101. Good products offered under better conditions succeed while inferior products do not. Maya is wonderful under Linux, and there is nothing else in its league available on a Unix-ish (OS X, Linux) platform.

Oh, yes. You can also buy numerous games, of course. Neverwinter Nights in particular will be releasing for all three major platforms in a single box. We'll see what this does for sales.

Same reason you can't have Photoshop for Linux, or Microsoft Office for Linux: because the vendor wouldn't make any money off of a version of their software for Linux.

Yet you can buy Maya for Linux, which costs just a hair more than Photoshop or Microsoft Office. You can buy Star Office, but most people don't, because OpenOffice is nearly the same quality with the definate promise of improvement. There's also Abiword. Gnumeric is a top-notch spreadsheet program that I've come to prefer to excel. There's more like this. There's really very little incentive to buy an office suite when you can get better for free.

In other fields, the Free alternatives tend to kick the hiney of their commercial counterparts. Let's try a few, okay? Pan, a newsreader based loosley on Agent. Pan is the only newsreader to score perfectly on the GNKSA Evaluations. Compared this to its commercial basis, Agent's score really sucks. Then there's Quanta for HTML editing. VIM is fine for most people, but if you need that Dreamweaver-like crap, Quanta does it without getting in your way. And it's REALLY good. Oh yes, it's Free with a capital "EFF."

This is a silly arguement to make against "Linux." This is Capitalism 101. Good products offered under better conditions succeed while inferior products do not. Maya is wonderful under Linux, and there is nothing else in its league available on a Unix-ish (OS X, Linux) platform.

Oh, yes. You can also buy numerous games, of course. Neverwinter Nights in particular will be releasing for all three major platforms in a single box. We'll see what this does for sales.

This law can only be enforced if the spammer is europe based.

Sadly this is almost never the case but i could be encouraging to other countries to adopt similar laws. We would never be able to block every spammer on earth but it would undoubtly reduce the amount of spam we have to cope with.

This is surely good news since my provider XS4ALL allready won a courtcase against a dutch spammer and recently introduced spam filters on everyones account (individually configurable by the subscriber).

Shuttle SS40G Mini-PC

Around when IBM sold Business Machines?. Yes

Even managed to kludge some hardware together to drive an IBM Golfball typewriter from my Exidy Sorcerer , which at 2.1 Mhz clockrate was the fastest gun in the west. In 1978 that is. Pre-IBM-PC. Pre-Mac. Contemporary with the TRS-80 Model 1 , the Commodore PET and the Apple II. Just have a look at the Old Computer Museum reference.

So just remember that one day, arguments about RedHat vs Debian will be considered "quaint", as the newest alphageek-wannabes argue shrilly about direct-neural-induction vs alphawave-heterodyning on the new Petaflop quantum-Beowulf-cluster-wearables.

While old codgers like me will still be trying to stop said wearables from having the usual code bloat and buffer overflows caused by AOL-Time-Warner-CNN-MicroSoft-General Motors-Unilever-Bell-Boeing-PepsiCo 31337 hackers rather than Software Engineers.

How the hell do you crack a key?

I read "crack a key" as "deduce a key".

Easy. Simply try every possible key against the content, and take what looks like valid content (all high bits turned off for ASCII text; valid MPEG-2 headers for DVDs) . This works best with the shorter key lengths used in some popular ciphers. For example, CSS, a 40-bit cipher, should take about 13 days to crack at 1 million keys per second. However, many ciphers and systems have holes, and CSS's Achilles heel lies in the disk key system. Given only the hash of the disk key, the complexity of a brute-force attack reduces to 25-bit, which should take well under a minute on even a slow PIII.

He was origionally a Decepticon, a friend of the weenie Starscreem. For the life of me, I could never figure out why Megatron never just blasted Starscreem into a million bits for his mutiny!

Okay, I'm now starting to get all nestolgic now.

He was origionally a Decepticon, a friend of the weenie Starscreem. For the life of me, I could never figure out why Megatron never just blasted Starscreem into a million bits for his mutiny!

Okay, I'm now starting to get all nestolgic now.

Defending Humanity's Honor

I thought chess fans might be interested in Tim Krabbé's site, in which he talks about things like chess playing programs taking part in tournaments and chess players having to pee into a cup in order to be considered sportsmen worthy of participation in the olympic games. Most importantly in the context of this dicussion, he talks about computers playing bad chess in Defending Humanity's Honor . I wonder if it's time to add that "Nemeth Gambit" to our repertoire.

I thought chess fans might be interested in Tim Krabbé's site, in which he talks about things like chess playing programs taking part in tournaments and chess players having to pee into a cup in order to be considered sportsmen worthy of participation in the olympic games. Most importantly in the context of this dicussion, he talks about computers playing bad chess in Defending Humanity's Honor . I wonder if it's time to add that "Nemeth Gambit" to our repertoire.

Most of the major MTA's will do this nowadays, but with a + rather than a -. I know sendmail does this, and am pretty sure about postfix and exim as well.

Look at this reference, for example.

... to hear the Linux source being read out over radio.

xs4all has also taken heat for hosting some anti-scientology pages.
There's some interesting stuff about when they got raided by the CoS (church of scientology) here.

Excerpt: A corporation like CoS, having its' own security service with a capacity equal to that of a small country, would scare the shit out of any normal firm. XS4ALL, however, is NOT a normal middle-sized firm. It is an ex-foundation, an offshoot of the Dutch hacker-magazine "HackTic". The staff at XS4ALL are ALL cyberpunks, former long-haired anarchists happy to find themselves in charge of a company so fast growing, that it is considered important for the Dutch national economy. And as you can tell from its' name, this is a company which wants to give everyone access to information, worldwide.

In other news, www.xs4all.nl will change to www.xs4allexceptcertainanarchistpublications.nl to represent recent events.

Would it not be a better idea for Deutsche Bahn to use their excess cash to:

• Secure Their Systems
• Find Better Ways to Transport Radioactive Waste

As the already-present mirrors show, attempting to censor people's right to freedom of speech on the Internet is a futile exercise.

After you show them where the man pages are and how to use the tab key be sure to show them something useful or they're just going to ask "why do I want to do this?". For example, run through a simple shell script. Like this one that allows you to quickly update your web page:

#!/bin/sh

rm -f ${1}.html && \
wget http://www.myisp.com/~me/${1}.html && \
vi ${1}.html && \
exec ftp www.myisp.com

Think of examples that do things Windows just doesn't let you do like running X applications remotely. Here's a must read regarding that topic:

Remote X Apps mini-HOWTO

The Xnest script from the above would be good.

Section 1.6 [...] indicates you can't implement CIFS without a license for those patents. The "Royalty-Free CIFS Technical Reference License Agreement" is the patent license, but it has an anti-GPL clause, and nothing else licenses you the patents.

So the patents make it complicated... I haven't thought about patents here, so I thought it would be solved if someone just rewrites those specs, something like OT III - Scientologys "secret" course rewritten for beginners. But fortunately, once again, software patents saved the day!

It's an antimatter version of the GPL, like a GPL from the parallel Star Trek universe where everyone was evil.

The whole thing starts to look really nasty... I wonder what will be the free software community riposte.