You don't know you Yitzhak Rabin is? What, have you been living on Mars this past decade or something?
He was the Israeli prime minister not too long ago, a champion of reconciliation with the Palestinians, and the victim of a right-wing Israeli assassin's bullet.
Yes, but it takes two to make war. Or are you forgetting the multinational invasion of Russia at the hands of the UK, France, Germany, US, Poland during the civil war? Are you going to blame this invasion, and the subsequent atrocities committed by the White army on the Bolsheviks as well?
The "millions of starved peasants" came later, with the Ukraine famine during the Stalinist period, when Stalin collectivised agriculture. You could try to get your facts straight.
Finally, yes, Lenin organised Gulags, otherwise known as "labour camps for criminals". The US had (has?) them too, and they were originally invented by the Brits during the Boer War.
He is right, however. You probably don't have a Mac or a Sun or an Ultra on your desk (unless you're one of the minority), you have an IBM pc clone, whose widespread use can be attributed to an open architecture (IBM's doing) and a standard, consistent OS (MSDOS). One major reason you can AFFORD to buy this pc is because these two things opened up a huge market that allowed economies of scale, bringing prices down (not the only reason, I admit it). Note that this combination pretty much blew the competition out of the water : where today are the SOLs, the Altairs, the IMSAIs, the Osbournes, the TRS80's, the Ataris, the Amigas?
So one reason why Linux was developed initially on an x86 was because Gates had a hand in making cheap x86 pcs to flourish, making them accessible to poor students (Linus has said he couldn't afford the commercial Unices, so I assume he wasn't fabulously wealthy). Ironically, it is partially thanks to Gates that Linux was initially x86 based.
I have no love for Gates or MS, but lets not rewrite history: Gates has had a fundamental role to play in the economics of the computer industry (even if, technologically, MS cannot be credited with any innovations, or even quality software). However, I admit that if it hadn't been Gates with MSDOS, it could well have been Kildall with CP/M, or someone else.
> Seriously, imagine if that sort of thing were > said about any religion: Islam, Hinduism, > Buddhism &c. No civilised person says that > sort of thing in public (in private, of course, > we all keep our own counsel on these things), > and yet no-one is afraid to libel Christianity.
That's because in western countries there aren't powerful muslim, hindu or buddhist lobby groups with influence over government, which pretend to know better than everybody how each person should lead their lives.
I have no love for _any_ religion, not hinduism, judaism, buddhism or islam. Yet these religions leave me alone. On the other hand, it's always christians that lobby for my kids to be forced into prayer at school, that abuse my friends who decide to have an abortion, that abuse my friends who are gay, and who are calling for tighter censorship laws. Some even wish to chastise my wife for using contraception.
If I were living in Egypt, I'm sure the pressure would come from islam. In that case, my harshest criticisms would be reserved for islam, not christianity. See? It's nothing personal - it just happens that christianity is the most powerful religion in these parts.
>Concerning cloning, my opinion as a Christian is >that it is just one more way of bringing life >into existence. I find it to be about as silly >as IVF; the normal way of producing children is >so much more fun;-) I am rather uncomfortable >with these people who are so obsessed with having >children that they go through these procedures; >it's not healthy to be so consumed.
Maybe, but that's your opinion. And of course you're welcome to have any opinion you wish, and voice it too, as long as you don't interfere with the rights of others. In this case, some people who can't have children will go to IVF, and will consider this to be an acceptable alternative. Nothing wrong with that.
Finally, cloning has valuable medical benefits too. It's possible to work out through cloning how genetic diseases arise, and it could be possible to detect likely victims and treat them early. The benefits are immense. I appreciate you may be against it, but please understand that others may not share your views.
In early modern times, there were debates on whether american natives had "souls" or not, i.e. whether the "savages" could be saved, or whether they were "only good for labour".
Don't rely on people's sense of compassion. When there are vested interests at stake, people can become heartless beasts.
Que? I always made Kirk to be the Ego, Spock the Super-Ego and McCoy the Id.
It was always Spock and McCoy having the arguments... Spock the eternally logical side of the psyche, and McCoy the passionate/emotional side. It was McCoy that always poked fun at Spock's lack of emotions.. and Spock always chastising McCoy for his emotionalism.
Kirk was on the other hand constantly torn between these two points of view... taking advice from either as the case may be. Besides, Kirk was the central character, so it's fitting he was the Ego.
I'm also an Aussie./er, and I think that soon we may need the help of hackers overseas to try to beat this law.
We'll need plenty of public proxy servers to get around this law and prove to these dickless people that you can't censor the net.
You'll be doing yourself a favour too if you help. Think what would happen if censorship in Australia actually worked: it'd become a precedent for other countries to follow suit, and before long you may find yourself also under censorship.
Goodness gracious, the "censor" seems to have no sense of humour. My post was *tongue* *in* *cheek*, a *parody* of the nonsense posts that go up whenever Sengan puts up an article.
There is a certain irony in trying to pin down the meaning of "postmodernism", since postmodernism itself tries to explode the myth of absolutes. However, I can give my own humble opinion, which will inevitably be open to dispute, given my somewhat limited readings on the subject.
I think the problem is that the terms have become overloaded by their use by various fields,e.g. architecture, fine arts, literature and philosophy.
Modernity has its roots in the Enlightenment... it is the "age of the grand narratives", or the age in which it was believed that humankind was ultimately comprehensible and perfectable. It's greatest exponent, in a way, is Karl Marx: he provided a world view that was all-encompassing, and utterly rational (in spite of what some brain dead neo-McCarthyites might think). The law of the day was reason, and the focus was on the human subject. Throughout modernity, the notion of the ego was an unquestioned assumption.
Modernism, in my view, depends on the field in which it is used. In the social sciences, it was marked by the appearance of Freud. In the fine arts, it refers to the works of Picasso, Braque, Rodin. In literature, it refers to the works of Joyce and Hesse. In architecture, it refers to the works of the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and De Corbusier. In many ways, these artists created in reaction to classisism... yet their works focused on the centred subject (i.e. it assumed the ego). They could portray a dismal, irrational world, but they always retained the modernist focus on the ego (e.g. the Dadaists, who really attacked reason as a protest against the horrors of WWI - an act which implicitly assumes the ego).
Postmodernism is the vision beyond (but not necessarily *after*) the modern. A whole mish-mash of ideas and themes fall under this banner. It's invariably a mish-mash, because postmodernism denies that grand narratives of human experience can be universal... hence a taxonomy of postmodernism cannot be universal.
Postmodern literature sees a "de-centering" of the subject, and the playful use of various elements from "pop-culture" genres... e.g. Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose" is a philosophical treatise dressed as a detective novel (possibly the bottom of the literary pecking order as far as moderns are concerned:)
Postmodern buildings will have a pastiche of elements from various epochs... they are in many ways a "pun" on the claims of universality of various epochs, a sort of playful joke. They are, on the whole, definitely more liveable than the modernist monstrosities we saw built in the 50's and 60's.
The roots of postmodernist art, of course, comes from the disintegration of the modernist project... which begins with the demolition of the ego. However, it's impossible to pin down when this happens in philosophy. Certainly Nietzsche began to break down the assumptions of the centred subject, of modernity's rationalism, of the perfectability of humankind back at the turn of the century. However, existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, who came much later, are still in the modernist camp: their focus on the ego or self is crucial to their writings. So the time when philosophy stops being modern and becomes post-modernist is not clear-cut.
In fact, this obsession with dividing everything into sequential clear cut periods is very much a modernist thing to do... I have heard from a lecturer that we have always lived in post-modernity, it's just that as moderns we hadn't realised.
It's interesting that post-modernists like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and others really started coming out of the woodwork in the 50's and 60's, soon after the excesses of Stalinism became apparent (after Kruschev's speech at the 20th party congress of the Communist Party). It also took off like a rocket after the Prague Spring, in 1968. A cynic might argue that it is the left intelligentsia's reaction to a failing Soviet Union...given that Marx was the pinnacle of Modernity, it sort of connects, does it not?
A really good book on the modernist and post-modernist transition in philosophy is Solomon's "Continental Philosophy since 1750", published by Oxford Press. A more humorous treatment of Postmodernism in art, literature, architecture and philosophy is "Postmodernism for Beginners" - a cartoon book!
Sorry, but Nietzsche is postmodern. It's not "reason to power" but "will to power". Objectivity flies out the door when the will to power is asserted: notions of "truth" and "falsehood" are irrelevant, what matters is _will_.
Though "Modernism" in the fine arts is usually applied to the period beginning with Picasso (probably from WWI to, say, WWII), the roots of Modernism in philosophy date back to the Enlightenment. It is then that the notions of reason and "objective truth" began to be in vogue.
Po-mo in architecture also had a late start - the death of the "functional building" took place in the early 70's, at which point monstrous monolithic apartment blocks ("machines to be lived in") began to fall out of favour... nowadays buildings tend to be less functional but more ornate, with elements borrowed from various epochs (e.g. columns, art deco and glass facades used simultaneously, etc)
However, as far as philosophy is concerned, pomo begins with Nietzsche (turn of the century), and continued with Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida et al. With these authors, there is a multiplicity of world-views, and no such thing as real "objectivity" (in fact, there is, but only as one particular world-view:) All of this would have been anathema to Modern thinkers such as Voltaire or Kant.
My personal opinion, however, is that Schopenhauer had a postmodern core - so pomo in philosophy goes back to the late 19th century.
"For the clueless, that means just say no to KDE." is slightly different from "Matt, you are forbidden from using KDE", n'est-ce pas?
So quit you whinin', boah!
Of course you can use KDE, no one's going to stop you (except for those little voices in your head). Hey, you can use Windows if you like. Do Windows users feel that RMS forbids them their software? No? So what's *your* problem?
The KDE contingent may go off on their own merry little way, but what RMS says is true: for FREE software, having a proprietary lib underpinning it is a bad idea. Most of those who have seen GNU grow from the early 80's understand this. There are some newcomers that believe otherwise, however. Fine. People can believe whatever they want. Hell, there are some people that think that Windows is neat. The KDE advocates are just a little less clueless than that lot.
Those of us who wish to see a FREE system develop have other ideas.
The tragedy is that the direction of the industry is determined by what the majority feels... even if they're wrong.
...just because he's rubbed some doofus-headed merkins up the wrong way is no reason to ostracise him.
Maybe you should listen your own free-speech rhetoric, and let Sengan be. If you don't like what he says, don't read it. Some of use *like* what he has to say.
Perhaps spending hours learning a new OS isn't acceptable for 99% of the population. Sure for a few geeks, college students, and people with free time this is fine. Microsoft is not evil, it is the PC's best chance at being accepted by everyone. If you think software monopolies are evil, use OS/2 or even DRDOS before they die, but stop your damn whining.
Love it. It was the one time that congress, traditionally the lapdog of corporate interests, decides for once to actually *listen* to public opinion and end the war, and you criticise it for that.
Congress didn't blow it... it actually listened to the tsunami of public opinion against the war. If it had chosen to continue the war it would have been an obvious travesty of democracy.
Normally congress wouldn' have been fazed by public opinion... but the 60's were a volatile time, and who knows what the people would have done if pushed far enough.
And if foreign corporations didn't own the natural resources of third world countries, third world folks wouldn't be reduced to being wage slaves to multinationals.
So what? Even if they did that, where would it get them? What evidence would they have that linux users are any more prone to pirating software than the average joe? How would the actions of a handful of people have any bearing on the moral character of millions of linux users?
They may as well say that linux users are communists, or witches, or heretics... it'd be pointless...
The only thing that MS could do if there was evidence of piracy is use that as an argument to refuse people their refunds. However:
1. MS would find it difficult to actually prove piracy is taking place. 2. Even if they could, that doesn't mean everyone who seeks a refund is guilty of piracy. 3. MS still has to comply with its own EULA.
Furthermore, since when does MS need evidence to spread FUD?? If they really wanted to, they'd do it regardless.
Pournelle may have a point, but it's irrelevant. The issue is not about MS being ripped off by pirates, it's about Linux users being ripped off by MS. There will always be pirates - that's no reason to refuse a refund to linuxers.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting this done to whom?
Unless, of course, it gets hit by a micrometeor, or if the propulsion system veers it off course by accident.
Make no mistake, Carl Sagan himself was torn between advovating plutonium and opposing it, though he came on the side of advocating it.
You don't know you Yitzhak Rabin is? What, have you been living on Mars this past decade or something?
He was the Israeli prime minister not too long ago, a champion of reconciliation with the Palestinians, and the victim of a right-wing Israeli assassin's bullet.
Yes, it is incongruous, but only if you think that this list reflects public opinion as a whole.
Fact is, though, only IT people, netheads, nerds, and some PHBs know who Linus is at this stage. Your ordinary Joe doesn't.
This poll only reflects the bias in the type of people that frequent the net.
In the larger picture, Linus is relatively unknown.
Yes, but it takes two to make war. Or are you forgetting the multinational invasion of Russia at the hands of the UK, France, Germany, US, Poland during the civil war? Are you going to blame this invasion, and the subsequent atrocities committed by the White army on the Bolsheviks as well?
The "millions of starved peasants" came later, with the Ukraine famine during the Stalinist period, when Stalin collectivised agriculture. You could try to get your facts straight.
Finally, yes, Lenin organised Gulags, otherwise known as "labour camps for criminals". The US had (has?) them too, and they were originally invented by the Brits during the Boer War.
He is right, however. You probably don't have a Mac or a Sun or an Ultra on your desk (unless you're one of the minority), you have an IBM pc clone, whose widespread use can be attributed to an open architecture (IBM's doing) and a standard, consistent OS (MSDOS). One major reason you can AFFORD to buy this pc is because these two things opened up a huge market that allowed economies of scale, bringing prices down (not the only reason, I admit it). Note that this combination pretty much blew the competition out of the water : where today are the SOLs, the Altairs, the IMSAIs, the Osbournes, the TRS80's, the Ataris, the Amigas?
So one reason why Linux was developed initially on an x86 was because Gates had a hand in making cheap x86 pcs to flourish, making them accessible to poor students (Linus has said he couldn't afford the commercial Unices, so I assume he wasn't fabulously wealthy). Ironically, it is partially thanks to Gates that Linux was initially x86 based.
I have no love for Gates or MS, but lets not rewrite history: Gates has had a fundamental role to play in the economics of the computer industry (even if, technologically, MS cannot be credited with any innovations, or even quality software). However, I admit that if it hadn't been Gates with MSDOS, it could well have been Kildall with CP/M, or someone else.
> Seriously, imagine if that sort of thing were
> said about any religion: Islam, Hinduism,
> Buddhism &c. No civilised person says that
> sort of thing in public (in private, of course,
> we all keep our own counsel on these things),
> and yet no-one is afraid to libel Christianity.
That's because in western countries there aren't powerful muslim, hindu or buddhist lobby groups with influence over government, which pretend to know better than everybody how each person should lead their lives.
I have no love for _any_ religion, not hinduism, judaism, buddhism or islam. Yet these religions leave me alone. On the other hand, it's always christians that lobby for my kids to be forced into prayer at school, that abuse my friends who decide to have an abortion, that abuse my friends who are gay, and who are calling for tighter censorship laws. Some even wish to chastise my wife for using contraception.
If I were living in Egypt, I'm sure the pressure would come from islam. In that case, my harshest criticisms would be reserved for islam, not christianity. See? It's nothing personal - it just happens that christianity is the most powerful religion in these parts.
>Concerning cloning, my opinion as a Christian is
>that it is just one more way of bringing life
>into existence. I find it to be about as silly
>as IVF; the normal way of producing children is
>so much more fun;-) I am rather uncomfortable
>with these people who are so obsessed with having
>children that they go through these procedures;
>it's not healthy to be so consumed.
Maybe, but that's your opinion. And of course you're welcome to have any opinion you wish, and voice it too, as long as you don't interfere with the rights of others. In this case, some people who can't have children will go to IVF, and will consider this to be an acceptable alternative. Nothing wrong with that.
Finally, cloning has valuable medical benefits too. It's possible to work out through cloning how genetic diseases arise, and it could be possible to detect likely victims and treat them early. The benefits are immense. I appreciate you may be against it, but please understand that others may not share your views.
In early modern times, there were debates on
whether american natives had "souls" or not,
i.e. whether the "savages" could be saved, or
whether they were "only good for labour".
Don't rely on people's sense of compassion.
When there are vested interests at stake,
people can become heartless beasts.
Que? I always made Kirk to be the Ego, Spock the Super-Ego and McCoy the Id.
It was always Spock and McCoy having the arguments... Spock the eternally logical side of the psyche, and McCoy the passionate/emotional side. It was McCoy that always poked fun at Spock's lack of emotions.. and Spock always chastising McCoy for his emotionalism.
Kirk was on the other hand constantly torn between these two points of view... taking advice from either as the case may be. Besides, Kirk was the central character, so it's fitting he was the Ego.
I'm also an Aussie ./er, and I think that soon we may need the help of hackers overseas to try to beat this law.
We'll need plenty of public proxy servers to get around this law and prove to these dickless people that you can't censor the net.
You'll be doing yourself a favour too if you help. Think what would happen if censorship in Australia actually worked: it'd become a precedent for other countries to follow suit, and before long you may find yourself also under censorship.
This is much bigger than just Australia!
Can they confirm that it won't come crashing back down to earth? Can they confirm that if it did, it would be totally destroyed on re-entry?
I don't want the thing to fall on my house.
Goodness gracious, the "censor" seems to have no sense of humour. My post was *tongue* *in* *cheek*, a *parody* of the nonsense posts that go up whenever Sengan puts up an article.
Anyone notice the "smiley" at the end of my post?
There is a certain irony in trying to pin down the meaning of "postmodernism", since postmodernism itself tries to explode the myth of absolutes. However, I can give my own humble opinion, which will inevitably be open to dispute, given my somewhat limited readings on the subject.
:)
I think the problem is that the terms have become overloaded by their use by various fields,e.g. architecture, fine arts, literature and philosophy.
Modernity has its roots in the Enlightenment... it is the "age of the grand narratives", or the age in which it was believed that humankind was ultimately comprehensible and perfectable. It's greatest exponent, in a way, is Karl Marx: he provided a world view that was all-encompassing, and utterly rational (in spite of what some brain dead neo-McCarthyites might think). The law of the day was reason, and the focus was on the human subject. Throughout modernity, the notion of the ego was an unquestioned assumption.
Modernism, in my view, depends on the field in which it is used. In the social sciences, it was marked by the appearance of Freud. In the fine arts, it refers to the works of Picasso, Braque, Rodin. In literature, it refers to the works of Joyce and Hesse. In architecture, it refers to the works of the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and De Corbusier. In many ways, these artists created in reaction to classisism... yet their works focused on the centred subject (i.e. it assumed the ego). They could portray a dismal, irrational world, but they always retained the modernist focus on the ego (e.g. the Dadaists, who really attacked reason as a protest against the horrors of WWI - an act which implicitly assumes the ego).
Postmodernism is the vision beyond (but not necessarily *after*) the modern. A whole mish-mash of ideas and themes fall under this banner. It's invariably a mish-mash, because postmodernism denies that grand narratives of human experience can be universal... hence a taxonomy of postmodernism cannot be universal.
Postmodern literature sees a "de-centering" of the subject, and the playful use of various elements from "pop-culture" genres... e.g. Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose" is a philosophical treatise dressed as a detective novel (possibly the bottom of the literary pecking order as far as moderns are concerned
Postmodern buildings will have a pastiche of elements from various epochs... they are in many ways a "pun" on the claims of universality of various epochs, a sort of playful joke. They are, on the whole, definitely more liveable than the modernist monstrosities we saw built in the 50's and 60's.
The roots of postmodernist art, of course, comes from the disintegration of the modernist project... which begins with the demolition of the ego. However, it's impossible to pin down when this happens in philosophy. Certainly Nietzsche began to break down the assumptions of the centred subject, of modernity's rationalism, of the perfectability of humankind back at the turn of the century. However, existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, who came much later, are still in the modernist camp: their focus on the ego or self is crucial to their writings. So the time when philosophy stops being modern and becomes post-modernist is not clear-cut.
In fact, this obsession with dividing everything into sequential clear cut periods is very much a modernist thing to do... I have heard from a lecturer that we have always lived in post-modernity, it's just that as moderns we hadn't realised.
It's interesting that post-modernists like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and others really started coming out of the woodwork in the 50's and 60's, soon after the excesses of Stalinism became apparent (after Kruschev's speech at the 20th party congress of the Communist Party). It also took off like a rocket after the Prague Spring, in 1968. A cynic might argue that it is the left intelligentsia's reaction to a failing Soviet Union...given that Marx was the pinnacle of Modernity, it sort of connects, does it not?
A really good book on the modernist and post-modernist transition in philosophy is Solomon's "Continental Philosophy since 1750", published by Oxford Press. A more humorous treatment of Postmodernism in art, literature, architecture and philosophy is "Postmodernism for Beginners" - a cartoon book!
Sorry, but Nietzsche is postmodern. It's not "reason to power" but "will to power". Objectivity flies out the door when the will to power is asserted: notions of "truth" and "falsehood" are irrelevant, what matters is _will_.
:) All of this would have been anathema to Modern thinkers such as Voltaire or Kant.
Though "Modernism" in the fine arts is usually applied to the period beginning with Picasso (probably from WWI to, say, WWII), the roots of Modernism in philosophy date back to the Enlightenment. It is then that the notions of reason and "objective truth" began to be in vogue.
Po-mo in architecture also had a late start - the death of the "functional building" took place in the early 70's, at which point monstrous monolithic apartment blocks ("machines to be lived in") began to fall out of favour... nowadays buildings tend to be less functional but more ornate, with elements borrowed from various epochs (e.g. columns, art deco and glass facades used simultaneously, etc)
However, as far as philosophy is concerned, pomo begins with Nietzsche (turn of the century), and continued with Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida et al. With these authors, there is a multiplicity of world-views, and no such thing as real "objectivity" (in fact, there is, but only as one particular world-view
My personal opinion, however, is that Schopenhauer had a postmodern core - so pomo in philosophy goes back to the late 19th century.
Oh, that would be "Alzheimer's".
:)
Given your spelling, I had to think about it for a while
"Ok, Trigger, stamp your hoof and tell me how
much is two plus two..."
*thud* *thud* *thud*
"For the clueless, that means just say no to KDE." is slightly different from "Matt, you are forbidden from using KDE", n'est-ce pas?
So quit you whinin', boah!
Of course you can use KDE, no one's going to stop you (except for those little voices in your head). Hey, you can use Windows if you like. Do Windows users feel that RMS forbids them their software? No? So what's *your* problem?
The KDE contingent may go off on their own merry little way, but what RMS says is true: for FREE software, having a proprietary lib underpinning it is a bad idea. Most of those who have seen GNU grow from the early 80's understand this. There are some newcomers that believe otherwise, however. Fine. People can believe whatever they want. Hell, there are some people that think that Windows is neat. The KDE advocates are just a little less clueless than that lot.
Those of us who wish to see a FREE system develop have other ideas.
The tragedy is that the direction of the industry is determined by what the majority feels... even if they're wrong.
...just because he's rubbed some doofus-headed
merkins up the wrong way is no reason to ostracise him.
Maybe you should listen your own free-speech rhetoric, and let Sengan be. If you don't like what he says, don't read it. Some of use *like* what he has to say.
"All communists... are facsists [sic] deep down".
This A/C went on to prove that true is false, night is day, white is black, before being run over on a zebra crossing. [Apologies to Douglas Adams]
Perhaps spending hours learning a new OS isn't acceptable for 99% of the population. Sure for a few geeks, college students, and people with free time this is fine. Microsoft is not evil, it is the PC's best chance at being accepted by everyone. If you think software monopolies are evil, use OS/2 or even DRDOS before they die, but stop your damn whining.
Love it. It was the one time that congress, traditionally the lapdog of corporate interests, decides for once to actually *listen* to public opinion and end the war, and you criticise it for that.
Congress didn't blow it... it actually listened to the tsunami of public opinion against the war. If it had chosen to continue the war it would have been an obvious travesty of democracy.
Normally congress wouldn' have been fazed by public opinion... but the 60's were a volatile time, and who knows what the people would have done if pushed far enough.
Now why would we want to do that? We have Linux, after all....
And if foreign corporations didn't own the natural resources of third world countries, third world folks wouldn't be reduced to being wage slaves to multinationals.
That's the ugliness of the (un)free market.
So what? Even if they did that, where would it get them? What evidence would they have that linux users are any more prone to pirating software than the average joe? How would the actions of a handful of people have any bearing on the moral character of millions of linux users?
They may as well say that linux users are communists, or witches, or heretics... it'd be pointless...
The only thing that MS could do if there was evidence of piracy is use that as an argument to refuse people their refunds. However:
1. MS would find it difficult to actually prove piracy is taking place.
2. Even if they could, that doesn't mean everyone who seeks a refund is guilty of piracy.
3. MS still has to comply with its own EULA.
Furthermore, since when does MS need evidence to spread FUD?? If they really wanted to, they'd do it regardless.
Pournelle may have a point, but it's irrelevant. The issue is not about MS being ripped off by pirates, it's about Linux users being ripped off by MS. There will always be pirates - that's no reason to refuse a refund to linuxers.
If it had been Sengan posting this article, everybody would have been screaming blue murder about him skewing the politics of /.
I feel a double-standard is in place.