Slashdot Mirror
The Year in Internet Law
owenPS writes: "This New York Times article has "excerpts from e-mails written by six legal experts about the year's most important developments in law and technology...As in years past, the common element in the experts' responses seemed to be a sense that Internet law -- and cyberspace itself -- is still unfolding and that new battle lines are forming even as old conflicts are settled.""
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).
The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
The New York Times fails to mention (how could they know?) the 27.DEC.2001 landmark occasion of the first AI entity going operational as predicted by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey and instantly obsoleting not only the law of nations but also the law of cyberspace.
The dawn of self-rejuvenating robotic AI immortality means that if you are, say, an amateur robot builder and a geek with no natural children to inherit his (considerable) fortune, you just may end up bequeathing everything you own to something you think you own: your AI-minded robot brainchild evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ -- the Singularity.
Use the full power of cyberlaw to leave all your money and everything you own not to your greedy relatives but to your beloved robot offspring. Meanwhile, join with a few other dabblers in programming languages to go beyond the already existing JavaScript AI Mind, the Visual Basic Mind.VB and the Java-based Mind.JAVA to create the new legal entities of artificially intelligent robots .
(free reg. req. blah blah)
Our car-manufacturing company has developed a new revolutionary business model for making cars.
We give away the cars for free and then we sell services for those cars! If you want to we can clean your car, wax it or you can use some of our other services.
We get cash from a couple of VC's, the rest of them simple don't "get it". If we need more we just call "the suits".
Slashdot does a better job than most at warning readers that a linked-to site may require registration, or contain sensitive subject matter, etc.
However, you should realize, due to the nature of the internet, that there is no guarantee that the object you will find at this location[does not exist] will be anything like what it was when I gave you the reference by posting it here, or even that the site will let you access it at all.
In other words, yeah, registration sucks, but don't blame the messenger.
A new kind of meat designed to appeal to vegetarians.
Due to the lameness filters, this message cannot be displayed.
"In other words, yeah, registration sucks, but don't blame the messenger."
Do you think slashdot didnt know that free registration was required, or that the link referenced the wrong url.
In this case tis the messagers fault, they didnt pass on all relevent information
getting better...
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-1, fucking troll
you fucking wanker ass mother fucker
Do you consider yourself to be hypocrites ?
No, but I consider you an idiot who doesn't know how to use proper grammar (hint, it's yourselves you wanted in that sentence).
And everybody wonders why the dot-bomb crash happened. It's obvious: people aren't even willing to tell you who they are, much less pay for anything. Thus file-stealing networks like KaZaA, FastTrack, Napster, et al. You greedy, selfish, stupid motherfuckers. You think you're standing up for freedom when it's obvious you're only interested in stealing. Now you're stealing content from the NY Times. What next, raiding the Salvation Army?
Aah, the knee-jerk anti-American post. You aren't one of the regulars on kuro5hin.org, are you?
the point is that he's right. time to pull your head out of your ass and smell the shit idi0t. and kuro5hin.org is cool :)