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I make no claim to accuracy or insider info. It's a parody, plain and simple, and as such is SUPPOSED to include FUD. Caricatures are the medium of satyre.

Who is this stank bitch you're lampooning? It's pretty funny, but is this based on a real person or a caricature of someone?

Inquiring minds want to know!

The socialist references in the article are particularly telling. Apart from the fact that Linksys and Progress weren't required to use GPL'ed software as the basis for their code, should not cavil at honoring the license the code was released under, and would be more than happy to sue anyone who violated their licenses--apart from all that, I say, is this weird underlying theme that the GPL is offensive to capitalism. Lyons, the article's author, and by extension Forbes magazine seem to take it as a personal affront that someone should choose not to profit from their work. I didn't know that capitalism was a moral mandate; I wasn't aware that I am required to make a profit if I can possibly do so. Silly me, I thought I was free to choose. This is an odd stance, considering the state science would be in if most scientists weren't willing to share freely the fruits of their researches. Lyons might still be publishing his screeds by painting them on cave walls.

Salesmen are, of course, trying to make profit and that's perfectly OK. However, they're not evil like you seem to think. Any company who sells more than it can deliever will soon be out of business.

Oh, Msft should just go with, caricature and exaggerate their existing tendancies to comic extremes: adopt a slight nazi accent, have an ad set in a scientific 'laboratory' (with spinning tape drive cabinets in the background), Ballmer shuts down a Linux box and inserts a Win 2003 CD while white frocked lab assistants strap Linus onto an operating table, Gates strokes the cat and says, "No Mr Torvalds, I expect you to DIE!".

Yep. A similar thing happened to me. After a complaint from a colleague with a slightly unusual style which may be a little anal, but some people find more readable and less likely to cause errors, a PHB called me into his office, and decided that because his culture was mentioned by name it must be an insult.

Anyway, because I assumed he was opposed to a style that embedded the type in a variable name, I suggested instead that we postfix the operator, even though neither MFC or Java support this syntax.

He immediately turned into a caricature from a very bad comedy because, all foreigners are intrinsically funny with their funny languages that we know they just make up.

Be interesting to see what happens since I've commited a number of federal crimes and claimed that the company ordered me to do them.

Anonymous Coward, the time has come.

I've been wanting to say this for a long time, but have held back. However, this time you have gone to damned far.

You worthless bag of filth. As they say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.

You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. A fetid pus-oozing festering boil on the anus of humanity. If the universe were nothing but K-Y jelly, you would be a grain of sand in it.

You are a fiend and a sniveling, spineless coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum. And I wish you would go away.

You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a putrefaction, a big suck on a sour lemon with a lime twist.

You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in regret for what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformation. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, a ferment, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class attempt at simulating one.

You snail-skulled little twit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. Your hand refuses autoerotism. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. You are the epitome of conceit; the flea, floating down a river with an erection, screaming to those that care, "Open up the damn drawbridge".

And what meaning do you expect your delusional self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile, one-handed, slack-jawed drooling meat slapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

If the sum total of all the knowledge, experience and wisdom that you have acquired in your stay thus far on earth were rolled into one great big ball and shoved up a gnat's asshole, there would be enough room left over for it to roll around like a BB in a boxcar.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into

I think that an important point it that transmission and generation need to be treated differently (and separately). I'm all in favour of a free market in generation (with government regulation). But I think that governments should continue to run the transmission.

The reasoning is simple: competition is good, monopolies are bad; if you can introduce competition, then do so; if you can't, then a government run monopoly is preferable to a private monopoly.

Power generation can clearly be run as a competative free market. Not free from government regulation, mind you; but there's no need for governments to run power plants. And the regulation has to work both ways, including fighting against the NIMBY instincts of land owners.

But for power transmission, on the other hand, it's very hard to have real competition. The barriers to entry (the start up capital of running lots of wires) are too high (generally. there are a few exceptions). So in that case, the government should run the distribution network (whether it's paid for out of general taxation or a user fee is another issue).

The worst thing you can do is have the government contract out a monopoly to the private sector. This produces the worst of both worlds and allows people to negatively caricature free markets, even though it isn't a free market, just a private company operating a monopoly.

There, problem solved. We've got free markets and we've got public ownership. Everyone's happy. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.

I tried, but I can't agree with you. A power granted does not need to be used. An example is the imposition of martial law. It could be used to "solve" all sorts of legal problems. Laws can be intended for use only in truly exceptional circumstances, after all. A government agency should be noted for it's commitment to serving citizens, it's ethics and it's restraint IMO. One could could argue that it's the fault of the lawmakers for not wording it correctly, but that implies that we expect government agencies to behave like out-of-control power-hungry caricatures. I don't think we (as a society) want to expect that.

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Isaac Asimov had a great essay on the subject of pulp heroes, where he pointed out the hero was usually physically powerful but mentally dense, while the villain was usually brilliant but physically weak, and the stories typically ended with the musclebound idiot beating up on the brilliant weakling.

If Asimov wrote this, in my opinion he was waaay off. The intellectual qualities of pulp heroes were in fact very strongly emphasized, in a way that sometimes seems ridiculous today. For example, Doc Savage, "The Man of Bronze," was a world-reknowned expert in multiple scientific and engineering fields as well as being a specimen of physical perfection... sorta like Buckaroo Banzai. To the list you can add The Shadow, Zorro, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan (being King of the Apes does not necessarily make you stupid), and others.

A lot of these guys were good at fighting as well, but having some kind of secret knowledge was even more common than having a secret identity or being a vigilante. Sherlock Holmes had his eXXtreme deductive reasoning and extensive specialized knowledge (like distinguishing brands of tobacco); Tarzan was basically a super-naturalist who could track anything, get animals to do his bidding, ... the radio version of the Shadow had learned in "the Orient" a hypnosis technique, "to cloud men's minds so they cannot see him." And there was Chandu the Magician (radio, not pulp, but from that era)... Fu Manchu was an genius anti-hero.

Where it changed was with Superman. In the comic books, radio serials, and the TV show, Superman was portrayed as being fairly smart, but AFAIK he almost never used his intelligence to solve problems. His special powers are not something that he earned, but just part of his nature.

The other really different innovation with Superman was (starting in the early 1940s) the emphasis on his virtue. Many (probably most) of the pulp heroes were good guys, although some were morally ambiguous, and some were anti-heroes. But after the first few years, Superman became the champion of "Truth and Justice," which a few years later turned into "Truth, Justice, and the American Way!"

Which might seem kind of corny now, but at the time, it was what kids needed. Looking back at what was going on the 1930s, Doc Savage seems like a sorta creepy ideal of the type championed by the Nazis. Not that the Doc Savage stories were more racist than any of the other stuff being published at the time, but the whole super-smart, super-fit, Man of Bronze thing gets to you. Superman on the other hand quickly adjusted to fight representations of the WWII enemies of the US, and to embody the moral clarity of the age. After the war, he continued to be super-patriotic. This may be an artifact of the cold war, but I haven't made up my mind about that. The good thing about the patriotism was that it actually was not very jingoistic, at least, not in the bits that I've seen. For quite a while Superman spent his time fighting a thinly-veiled caricature of the KKK, spoke about the need for tolerance, and so on. If you're going to be feeding moralistic stories to kids, fighting racism is at least a decent cause to be espousing.

Anyway, this is way off topic. To conclude, if Asimov was referring to comic books rather than pulp fiction, then I agree with his assessment. But I do think some of the comic books actually had a positive message... at least, Superman of about 1945-1955, and years later, the stuff that Stan Lee wrote in the 1960s and 1970s. Superman is not quality literature, but it's not harmful to people, and neither is pulp fiction. (The Silver Surfer on the other hand... :-)

You left out the initial sequence of events: I mentioned Gentoo only as it regards new advances in distribution building, and somebody took it as an opportunity to offer a Gentoo testimonial. Such testimonials are often overexuberant. If anything, nobody's flaming the guy who did it, but the abstract "Gentoo zealot" who really only exists as an amalgam of all these overexuberant testimonials that seem to show up at the drop of a hat.

Look, if you make fun of the caricature of a Perl advocate, I'll laugh, even though I'm a Perl programmer and think people in the Perl community are some of the smartest around. There's a caricature of Gentoo folks as always zealously pushing their operating system as the "one true solution" in any discussion, at the drop of a hat, etc. Admit that some people do that, and deal with it.

Well, allegories are fine. Animal Farm is at least a clear caricature of historical events. LOTF is sociofiction: not based on real events, or on documented cases. If it is a moral story about adult human society, it has the same failings as if it was literal fiction about children. Adults do not spontaneously resort to violence without specific triggers, none of which are even hinted at in the book.

Animal Farm carefully examines how the lust for power makes an egalitarian system impossible, how when freed from their human masters, the animals recreate the same structures of power and control they tried to hard to escape, how the revolution eats its own children, and why the destruction of political structures is so much worse than the gentle reformation of them.

Lord of The Flies just says: little boys are nasty things that go around poking each other with sharp sticks, and that's it as far as serious analysis goes. Metaphor or not, it stinks as much as the pigs head that forms the most interesting and relevant character in the book.

Like I said, it is propaganda, widely used by teachers to instill fear in children.

Fiction like this says a lot more about the author than it says about the rest of the world.

LOTF is just well-dressed propaganda, teaching youngsters that without the guiding adult hand they inevitably descend into primitive violence. No coincidence it's such a favorite of teachers.

Life's real stories of youngsters abandoned shows something quite different. In the Polish ghettos, Nazi camps, streets of Rio and of Kinshasa... children form groups and look after each other.

The most flagrant examples of children acting violently are wars in which adults abduct children and train them as soldiers: Colombia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Liberia, and many other cases... it's the adults doing the damage.

Children don't have holy water running through their veins, but they do not embody naked evil either. They just try to get along. LOTF is a caricature, based on the idea of "original sin", saying that we ar civilized only because society keeps us in check. Bullshit. Society is an expression of our human nature, and civilization is a natural consequence of our innate desire for an easy life and our built-in mechanisms for conflict avoidance.

"The "Free Software Alliance" (FSA) is an imaginary organisation, created by Arlene McCarthy (MEP, UK Labour) in August 2003 for the purpose of press briefings. The FSA is a mirror of the BSA: it fights aggressively and intrusively for the right of its members to free-ride on other people's intellectual property. The FSA supports a caricature of the positions of the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) and the Eurolinux Alliance. Unlike FFII, Eurolinux and BSA, the FSA consists only of computer rights campaigners, and enjoys no support among commercial software producers."

http://swpat.ffii.org/players/fsa/

Although I think the basic problem here is that Konami lacks the "mascot" characters that companies like Nintendo have. Most of Konami's games are more serious and oriented towards an older audience: Solid Snake, Alucard, and the heroes from the Silent Hill series are less given to the sort of caricature that is in some respects essential for games of this ilk.

Your prayers were answered before you even knew you had them. The game features Dracula from Castlevania, Grey Fox from Metal Gear Solid, Goemon from Mystical Ninja, Vic Viper from Gradius, and, of course, the ever-present Moai.

Of all the companies out there that have the kind of pull to do this, I think Sega is probably the only one left I can think of. Square too, perhaps, but we all remember Ergheiz and Chocobo Racing were bad ideas. Or a great ideas, I can't decide. Let me just say that if I ever see a game where Solid Snake and Alucard are driving around go-karts is the day I stop purchasing video games.

LOL! Mod this up! This is the highest form of caricature of an indignant righwinger I've seen in a long time.

It's very easy to demonize people who try to look for societal causes for horrible things. Particularly when those societal causes are things like video games, or comic books. And so, in the 50 years since Seduction of the Innocent was published, Wertham has become a figure of comical ridicule - even by people who haven't read anything written by him beyond the oft-quoted paragraph about Batman and Robin.

The problem with things like that is that only token research paints a far more nuanced picture of Wertham.

I quote here from Will Brooker's excellent book Batman Unmasked, in which he gives a far more well-researched study of Wertham than most people do. He is reading here a passage in which Wertham talks about homosexuality:

"We might now quibble with the term 'malorientation', but overall, rather than expressing shock and outrage, Wertham's tone seems one of quite reasonable concern. He does not, in my opinion, come across as 'shrill' or 'anguished'. Rather than advocating a witch-hunt against deviants, he understands that in a climate where homosexuality is a great taboo, gay fantasies might be a source of worry for young men." ...
"If we learn that Wertham's suspicion of Superman comics was based on his discomfort with all aspects of Fascism and his fear that children might learn to admire both physical force and the domination of 'inferior' peoples, his writing on this subject may also make more sense.

It would no doubt surprise many of those who caricature him as a bigot to learn that, during the 1920s, Wertham was one of the few psychiatrists who would treat black patients; that he spent the war years campaigning without result and against great hostility to establish a low-cost clinic in Harlem; that his LaFargue Clinic was finally opened on 113th Street in March 1944 with the help of funding from Ralph Ellison and the support of New York's black ministers."

That is not to say that Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent is a good reading - his look at comic books is selective, and his case studies are limited.

But simplifying Wertham, or Thompson, for that matter, as an overzealous bigot looking to make a cheap buck off of popular hysteria is falling into the same trap you're accusing them of. As with most things, the issue is a lot more complex and nuanced than that.

I'm not saying that video games cause violence. But, considering the strong evidence that media does influence the attitudes of the people who consume it, I can see how a reasonable and intelligent person could believe video games to be harmful. /shrug.

Demonizing things is bad, mmkay?

This is what happens when you draw 1-dimensional caricatures of america and then base your radical rants on those caricatures.

I'm very pleased to see that the US is deeply divided on all these issues. There is no 100% agreement, and George Bush was elected BY A MINORITY - a bizarre loophole in the electoral college.

What's funny is these comments coming from Europe. Tell me about the anti-terror tactics in the UK, where there is a gov't video camera on every corner!!!

Talk about big brother. Why doesn't Ian rant about that? Why aren't Europeans drawing 1-dimensional caricatures about the brits?