While a 555 timer offers flexibility, I decided a christmas tree light and relay required less effort. Let's see if I've got that page up. Yep Dinky Cox page lacks space!
Then don't deal with crap and take money for it. "Everyday computer problems" come from Microsft. If you don't use it at home, why would you recommend it to someone else? Your life is much easier when you get a package of free software together that works, and can administer it with your client's permission via ssh. Now that's worth some money and there is money to be made at it. The other stuff is not worth your time and you should just send it to CompUSA if they insist on M$. There they can understand just how "easy" the world of comercial software is.
It was tech support like this and "all lines lead to sales" that helped me to see that an "unsupported" operating system was better than Microsoft. Text file editing suddenly looked better than everchanging comerical GUI stuff and regedit. Thank you so much, but you really do need to appologize to your mom.
judging by the quick slashdotting, there must be a lot of unemployed geeks out there.
That, or M$'s increase in "research" has is already paying off. Must be yet another PR firm hired to DoS everything on Slashdot's front page. I wonder if they are ugly enough to use dead people's names for this one.
That is certainly open to interpretation, but at the very least it means that sites that really need cookies can relax. Shopping online, logging in to a news site, or any form of web-based mail are all services the user explicitly asks for, after all.
I'll go further than you and say that this is great. It's not so much that the site user must explicitly ask for cookie services as much as the company CAN NOT do anything with cookies that they don't tell the user about and the user approves. I know this sounds like the same thing, but the implementation can be done differently. It's going to be an all or nothing deal we can imagine, but companies that lie are going to get burnt. Hopefully, this will extend to banner adds, theoretically hosted by another machine. Honest companies can relax.
If people have trouble making their stupid IIS servers comply with this, then IIS was never honest to begin with. While M$ dishonesty is the root of their bad performance, complying with Sweedish laws are the least of the problems users of IIS have to deal with.
There's just no way that one embarrassing incident and the subsequent mockery is worth [250,000] Besides which, he's not even suing the people who actually mocked him. He's suing people who [posted his video]. What's the accusation, contributory mockery?
Cotributory mockery, that's good. That's sort of what it is, using a press to make fun of someone. You need to think a little about the consequenses of it before you brush it off as trivial.
It's prety well established that private people own their visage. Coke can't take your picture and use it without your permission. It's not simply because they might owe you money, it's because you have the right to portray yourself to the world as you want and not be portrayed by others as something you are not.
The people who published that tape violated the life and privacy of the Star Wars Kid. He will be recognized by Universities he would attend, prospective employers, as well as many people he meets. All of them will have a strange preconception of him because a odd moment from his childhood has been into a public joke. Showing the tape to a few friends is one thing. Putting it up on the internet with blanket permission to copy and distribute is another. Had the victim been proud of his performance and posted it himself, that would be another thing too, but he was not and did not and the world should respect his choice.
Would you like to be the star of my movie? If you had any imagination and initiative, you might have made a video that's different enough to make people laugh. We can cut it up and put it online too. I don't think you qualify, because you have neither imagination, initiative nor sympathy.
$250,000 might be a life savings to one person. Split four ways it's equivalent to buying him a nice car. As our good kid may never get a job as a good corporate drone over this, it's a fitting punishment.
There's no reason to unreasonably subject a company to liability or additional liability regarding a clear risk. We simply don't know the risks associated with SCO's copyright registration.... I am recommending holding off on additional Linux installations/upgrades as well as ascertaining how many, if any, machines have the 2.4 Kernel.
That's pathetic and you are doing your company a great disservice. If you don't know what the risk is, it's not clear and you need to do more research. If the risk is small or not credible, and it's not, you should not be moved by it. Your auditing of kernels is a waste of effort (though a small shell script should do it for you) and your delay in adopting free software subjects your company to the very well proven costs of running insecure, unreliable, expensive software.
I would suggest hari-kari or a change of jobs for someone who uttered such nonsense to upper management. Do your homework and act reasoanbly, please.
"Gartner recommends that enterprises hit by both Code Red and Nimda immediately investigate alternatives to IIS, including moving Web applications to Web server software from other vendors, such as iPlanet and Apache," explains Gartner's John Pescatore.
The alternatives "have much better security records than IIS and are not under active attack by the vast number of virus and worm writers."
That's as bad as Gatner has ever been to M$, but it's not bad at all. Notice that the recomendation contained an appology. Gatner has consistenly ignored the problems that lead to Cod Red, poor quality code and an inferior security model, to consistnetly recomend them over better software. The current fluff recomending M$ or "Unix" solutions to "complex" M$ created problems, ignores BSD, Apple and other solutions that are fine if not better.
Microsoft seeks to delay free software adoption untill they have Paladium in place. Gartner is right behind them.
First of all the RIAA did not target people's parents. The RIAA is targetting the ISP's account holders, which is perfectly logical.
No it's not logical and people getting sued for their kidd's downloading of 5 songs feel like targets.
Second of all, the parent who was notified that their child was subpoened was NOT notified by the RIAA. They were notified by the Associated Press. It says right there in the article that the RIAA didn't even know that people like the AP could get hold of that type of information.
No, a suppena is delivered to the person being sued. The victims, who can't easily get information about people's criminal convictions, were surprised to learn that a reporter had their name and could publish their embarassment in the local or national paper. The RIAA has certianly notified 65 year old grandparents that they are will see them in court.
So yeah, the RIAA is bad and evil, and so is Microsoft, and SCO and the other flavors of the month, but at least read the article before you comment, so you can get your facts right.
That's good advice. You should think before you shoot your mouth off and proactively defend evil cartels. You have lept to several unwaranted conclusions and completely missed the point: that the 871 suppenas are mostly harrasment and bear little resemblence to a who's who of music trading. These jacksasses are creating all sorts of heartache for all sorts of people. None of them has done anything wrong and many of them have not even done what the RIAA thinks they did. It's yet another big waste of effort designed to teach you that sharing is bad.
I hope it backfires right in their face. People are going to realize that copyright law is out of control.
Yes... let us not let any of our music, art, movies, etc linger longer than a decade. After all, we do everything so much better now, right?
Music from the 1970s did not linger. The vast majority of it was ruthlessly suppressed while a very tiny fraction was nausiatinly played to death. This is the way cartells make lots of money, not the way free markets work. I think this is what the previous poster noticed and was complaining about. Both your and his problem would be solved if copyright law was half reasonable because all of it would be free. Such a thing would ruin the RIAA, because they would not be able to make money selling culture anymore, culture would be free for the taking and able to grow on it's own. Artists with merrit would be in demand, not the crap you've been force fed all your life. This is the way Napster worked - all music from all eras was avaliable, not just 300,000 repackaged top 40 crap songs.
when someone uses your computer to share music, you should thank them, not send them to jail like those extortionate thugs from the RIAA who sent out all of these stupid letters would like you to. Sharing music is no more a crime than broadcasting Britiany Spears over FM radio is a crime. Well, that kind of freqency waste is almost criminal.
A member of our LUG told me his company had a bunch of computers for us. He did not know how long they would last, because they were close to a chemical spill.
Three operators were in similar shape, listed in critical condition.
Human life and effort are the basis of all economic worth. Things that are easy to make are cheap. Things that require much effort are expensive. Robots can be mass produced. They will be as cheap as PCs and motor scooters are today. The friends and relatives of those three operators will find no replacements for the operators who die. The operators who live will find no replacements for their limbs and lungs.
The more automation you have in some places, the better.
I was asked to consider the emptynes and serinity of many months of unemployment. It motivated me to look for another job. My attachment to food, shelter and cloathing is still too great for me to reach enlightenment, I'm afraid.
Where do you work? When you get caught napping, they will post your job and I need one of those.
Microsoft will simply license the patent. There is no way that they would allow themselves to be prevented from shipping product
They could have done this from the start, but it's obvious that the company with a patent on a "secure operating system" has no respect for other people's "intelectual property". How absurd it was for them to argue that Intertrusts patents were, too vague to be enforceable, and that others required such narrow interpretation that they would have been hard for Microsoft to infringe.
One thing's for sure, neither Microsoft nor patent law can win. Without strong patent law, Microsoft will fall to superior free software. If Microsoft wins, patent law suffers. If they lose, they can be ruined and that would be shocking. It would be better for Microsoft to lose.
The absurdity of patent law must be demonstrated and this is a great way to do it. Patent law has worked to the disadvantage of others and should work to Microsoft's disadvantage too. Microsoft's defeat and ruin by forgein firms might just shock the US population into examining and overturning the laws that idiots like Bill Gates pushed for. Sony and Philips have invested more than half a billion dollar in this 30 person firm and patent portfolio. It is right and fitting that Microsoft be destroyed by the laws they helped create and then used to abuse others. It will be sweeter still if their destruction leads to the end of software patents.
Who am I kidding? Microsoft is going to win, patent law will continue to be available to the hightest bidder and US courts will still be the finest money can buy. It will be interesting but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Who are you calling a dumbass? Perhapse I want to bring my wireless equiped Zaurus so I can IM with my friends who can't make it to the game. Wireless is just another communications tool - it's what you make of it. What's it to you? Keep your pitty to yourself.
The other side you amazingly call ignorant simply thinks that PGE Stadium is smoking crack to declare themselves the owners of all communications in the stadium. Do they think they can pick and chose which radio stations broadcast into the stadium, what cell phone company you can use? How about what newspaper can send repersentatives, or who can take pictures? They are nuts, but maybe you think they are right?
This place could be for you. You seem to like telling other people how to act and think. Do you like it when other people tell you what you can bring to a ballgame. Maybe you fit right in with the other sheeple in the world who don't mind being told what electronic devices they can use, what beer they can drink, what snaks they can pay through the nose for, what adverts they MUST see and listen to, and all that other money grubbing shit that takes much fun out of going to a ballgame. Do you mind being thought of as a "captive" audience?
"This is our stadium, and we run the communications for it," said Chris Metz, a PGE Park spokesman.
So, what does that idiot think of my cell phone? Want to buck the FCC there by intentionally jamming the signal Mr. Metz? Why not go for radio and TV broadcasts.
I like the Faraday cage, but a huge discharging tesla coil would be better. When someone's playing baseball, all communications in Portland should fail. They could put it up by the scoreboard so everyone can see that PGE owns everyone else's communications. Don't forget to confiscate pens, pencils, chalk and pointy objects we don't want anyone recording images of the game for later distribution.
The technology is great, but there are obsticals to deployment here that have to be considered. One factor is transportation. If transportation costs can't be overcome, it might be best to toss things into a landfill. Another is how to justify the idea and how it would actually be implemented.
I would expect recycling to cost much more here becase we are so relatively spread out. Japan has half as many people as the US does, squezed into a space smaller than California with a large portion uninhabitable. They are predicting a cost of $25 to the end user who wants to get rid of something. You can't do so much as ship a fridge for that kind of money here, even all smashed up into scrap that has value.
Local manufacturing can make use of segregated scrap, but agian transportation for other feedstocks can hurt them. A secret ingredient of a cast iron drain maker in South Florida was oil filters. They had both steel and fuel! That is a local industry making use of something directly. It can work and it does.
The economic option for the US might just be to make things last longer and repair them. It would be just as easy to force makers of large appliances carry replacement parts for 20 years as it would be to force design changes for recycling. Stability like that would foster a secondary market for parts and support repair men rather than junk men. Either way you look at it, you are interfereing with the free market in a big way.
The justification for this inteference is that mass producers of heavy objects are creating waste that all of us must deal with. Makers of refidgerators and washing machines have been relatively free to profit off sales of tons of toxic materials that must be disposed of. Their feedback from the individuals who purchase may not be strong enough to promote responsible manufacturing. Cars that fall apart in five years are a prime example. Free market forces that worked to the advantage of makers of more durable vehicles have been thwarted by protectionist legislation. The solution may not be to make things easier to knock apart and thus less durable.
Think what the creators of planned obsolescence can do with legislation like this before you back it!
This should really be corrected. The trademark is simply on the name. You can't go write your own software and call it Linux. But the software and code is as far from proprietary as you can get. If Linus started wrecking Linux with patches, you could take the code, rename it, and have your own kernel. This guy should RTFL (license) before he writes an article.
Yeah, you know, I know and he knows. What he's pointing out is that others are misrepresenting this. Microsoft talks about "gatekeepers" exerting control over free software projects, though they have given up the famous bus atack. SCO is playing on the confusion between the Linux kernel and ALL of free software. How else can they make the insane statement, "Linux is an illegal derivative of Unix."? Thanks for bringing up the concept. There are some people who don't understand the nature of free software. Now to correct the confusion people unforetunate enough to have never directly used free software, repeat that 268,000 times.
Sounds hard? Well it is, because there's billions of dollars of propaganda aimed at convincing you that every idea has an owner and is therefore a kind of property. It's ugly when someone like Madonna thinks no one should ever sing her songs in a public place without first asking for permision and then paying her. It's really gaulling when the same people try to convince you that the same thing is true, in however small a degree, of the most widely know piece of free software in the world. They want you to think that even Linux has an "owner" who you owe something too. Correcting this perception is difficult.
What you have to realize is that all of these groups are fighting SCO everyday. Everyday, millions of free software users voice their opinion of the SCO's ownership of Unix, the Linux kernel and everything. Don't you hear them? Neither do SCO's accountants. Microsoft is about the only company that's bought into this extortion. The people who know, think SCO is full of bull and don't waste much time on it.
Reasonable opinions have been delivered by the Open Software Initiative, the Free Software Foundation, Linus Torvalds and the German court system. The local LUG would be happy to talk to you about this, and their mailing lists are amazingly free of Astroturf. Not even Microsoft can buy enough fake roots to cover all the LUGs in the world. It's nice to hear from this OSV, whether you call it a LUG, marketing, advocacy and focus group, or friend of the court.
I have a PC mothballed, but it's an older PC with ISA slots. Who makes an appropriate WiFi card for ISA?
I have a PC mothballed, but I don't have the power company gift certificates mothballed. An 802.11* access point uses less electric power than a PC.
You can find 486s with PCI for like $5 if you don't have an old P90 sitting around. People put them in the trash. Better still, you can get a pcmcia enabled laptop for $15 on ebay. My P90 thinkpad with Debian runs OLVWM as well as wifi and ethernet card. Seach ebay for "486 laptop", and find a thinkpad in good shape. Better yet, use the one your company wants to put in the trash because XP won't run on it.
The electricity used by a typical old PC is less than the 150 Watt power supply is rated for. If you have to worry about 100 watts, make sure you turn off all the lights and replace your 250 watt monitor with one of the above mentioned laptops and X into your computers. This is not a concern for most people, much less the corporate market the access point people want to sell to.
someone like me accidentally swipes you off the road in my '84 Cutlass hoopty.
Kinda hard to drive that piece of shit after someone like me slashes the tires, bricks the windows and lights the stereo, seats and driver on fire, no? Oh yeah, that's if you are nice and quiet. If you blow your horn, I'll cut your nuts off first. Stand out and die, bitch.
I don't like you. I know why I don't like you too.
''MIT of course has a policy of complying with lawfully issued subpoenas,'' the school's information services director, James Bruce, said in an e-mail statement. But Bruce said that MIT had been advised by counsel that the subpoena was not in compliance with court rules concerning the proper venue for such a filing and ''did not allow MIT time to send any notice as the law requires.''
We might imagine "counsel" for MIT comes from one of the less technically adept Universities. After a couple of years at MIT, they might even get it. In the mean time, you don't have to be much of a tech guru to understand the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act requirements to notify students before the release of personal information such as names and addresses. Nor do you have to be much a lawyer to understand jusritictional issues. Hell, they could get someone from LSU to do that much. What's up with these RIAA clowns? OK, extortionists and music pimps are not well known for their legal prowess either.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's some of what I saw.
While a 555 timer offers flexibility, I decided a christmas tree light and relay required less effort. Let's see if I've got that page up. Yep Dinky Cox page lacks space!
Then don't deal with crap and take money for it. "Everyday computer problems" come from Microsft. If you don't use it at home, why would you recommend it to someone else? Your life is much easier when you get a package of free software together that works, and can administer it with your client's permission via ssh. Now that's worth some money and there is money to be made at it. The other stuff is not worth your time and you should just send it to CompUSA if they insist on M$. There they can understand just how "easy" the world of comercial software is.
That, or M$'s increase in "research" has is already paying off. Must be yet another PR firm hired to DoS everything on Slashdot's front page. I wonder if they are ugly enough to use dead people's names for this one.
I'll go further than you and say that this is great. It's not so much that the site user must explicitly ask for cookie services as much as the company CAN NOT do anything with cookies that they don't tell the user about and the user approves. I know this sounds like the same thing, but the implementation can be done differently. It's going to be an all or nothing deal we can imagine, but companies that lie are going to get burnt. Hopefully, this will extend to banner adds, theoretically hosted by another machine. Honest companies can relax.
If people have trouble making their stupid IIS servers comply with this, then IIS was never honest to begin with. While M$ dishonesty is the root of their bad performance, complying with Sweedish laws are the least of the problems users of IIS have to deal with.
Cotributory mockery, that's good. That's sort of what it is, using a press to make fun of someone. You need to think a little about the consequenses of it before you brush it off as trivial.
It's prety well established that private people own their visage. Coke can't take your picture and use it without your permission. It's not simply because they might owe you money, it's because you have the right to portray yourself to the world as you want and not be portrayed by others as something you are not.
The people who published that tape violated the life and privacy of the Star Wars Kid. He will be recognized by Universities he would attend, prospective employers, as well as many people he meets. All of them will have a strange preconception of him because a odd moment from his childhood has been into a public joke. Showing the tape to a few friends is one thing. Putting it up on the internet with blanket permission to copy and distribute is another. Had the victim been proud of his performance and posted it himself, that would be another thing too, but he was not and did not and the world should respect his choice.
Would you like to be the star of my movie? If you had any imagination and initiative, you might have made a video that's different enough to make people laugh. We can cut it up and put it online too. I don't think you qualify, because you have neither imagination, initiative nor sympathy.
$250,000 might be a life savings to one person. Split four ways it's equivalent to buying him a nice car. As our good kid may never get a job as a good corporate drone over this, it's a fitting punishment.
That's pathetic and you are doing your company a great disservice. If you don't know what the risk is, it's not clear and you need to do more research. If the risk is small or not credible, and it's not, you should not be moved by it. Your auditing of kernels is a waste of effort (though a small shell script should do it for you) and your delay in adopting free software subjects your company to the very well proven costs of running insecure, unreliable, expensive software.
I would suggest hari-kari or a change of jobs for someone who uttered such nonsense to upper management. Do your homework and act reasoanbly, please.
"Gartner recommends that enterprises hit by both Code Red and Nimda immediately investigate alternatives to IIS, including moving Web applications to Web server software from other vendors, such as iPlanet and Apache," explains Gartner's John Pescatore.
The alternatives "have much better security records than IIS and are not under active attack by the vast number of virus and worm writers."
That's as bad as Gatner has ever been to M$, but it's not bad at all. Notice that the recomendation contained an appology. Gatner has consistenly ignored the problems that lead to Cod Red, poor quality code and an inferior security model, to consistnetly recomend them over better software. The current fluff recomending M$ or "Unix" solutions to "complex" M$ created problems, ignores BSD, Apple and other solutions that are fine if not better.
Microsoft seeks to delay free software adoption untill they have Paladium in place. Gartner is right behind them.
No it's not logical and people getting sued for their kidd's downloading of 5 songs feel like targets.
Second of all, the parent who was notified that their child was subpoened was NOT notified by the RIAA. They were notified by the Associated Press. It says right there in the article that the RIAA didn't even know that people like the AP could get hold of that type of information.
No, a suppena is delivered to the person being sued. The victims, who can't easily get information about people's criminal convictions, were surprised to learn that a reporter had their name and could publish their embarassment in the local or national paper. The RIAA has certianly notified 65 year old grandparents that they are will see them in court.
So yeah, the RIAA is bad and evil, and so is Microsoft, and SCO and the other flavors of the month, but at least read the article before you comment, so you can get your facts right.
That's good advice. You should think before you shoot your mouth off and proactively defend evil cartels. You have lept to several unwaranted conclusions and completely missed the point: that the 871 suppenas are mostly harrasment and bear little resemblence to a who's who of music trading. These jacksasses are creating all sorts of heartache for all sorts of people. None of them has done anything wrong and many of them have not even done what the RIAA thinks they did. It's yet another big waste of effort designed to teach you that sharing is bad.
I hope it backfires right in their face. People are going to realize that copyright law is out of control.
Music from the 1970s did not linger. The vast majority of it was ruthlessly suppressed while a very tiny fraction was nausiatinly played to death. This is the way cartells make lots of money, not the way free markets work. I think this is what the previous poster noticed and was complaining about. Both your and his problem would be solved if copyright law was half reasonable because all of it would be free. Such a thing would ruin the RIAA, because they would not be able to make money selling culture anymore, culture would be free for the taking and able to grow on it's own. Artists with merrit would be in demand, not the crap you've been force fed all your life. This is the way Napster worked - all music from all eras was avaliable, not just 300,000 repackaged top 40 crap songs.
when someone uses your computer to share music, you should thank them, not send them to jail like those extortionate thugs from the RIAA who sent out all of these stupid letters would like you to. Sharing music is no more a crime than broadcasting Britiany Spears over FM radio is a crime. Well, that kind of freqency waste is almost criminal.
Nah, they are going to put it into M$ Word format. Let's see anyone figure that one out.
Three operators were in similar shape, listed in critical condition.
Human life and effort are the basis of all economic worth. Things that are easy to make are cheap. Things that require much effort are expensive. Robots can be mass produced. They will be as cheap as PCs and motor scooters are today. The friends and relatives of those three operators will find no replacements for the operators who die. The operators who live will find no replacements for their limbs and lungs.
The more automation you have in some places, the better.
Where do you work? When you get caught napping, they will post your job and I need one of those.
Sweet Dreams!
They could have done this from the start, but it's obvious that the company with a patent on a "secure operating system" has no respect for other people's "intelectual property". How absurd it was for them to argue that Intertrusts patents were, too vague to be enforceable, and that others required such narrow interpretation that they would have been hard for Microsoft to infringe.
One thing's for sure, neither Microsoft nor patent law can win. Without strong patent law, Microsoft will fall to superior free software. If Microsoft wins, patent law suffers. If they lose, they can be ruined and that would be shocking. It would be better for Microsoft to lose.
The absurdity of patent law must be demonstrated and this is a great way to do it. Patent law has worked to the disadvantage of others and should work to Microsoft's disadvantage too. Microsoft's defeat and ruin by forgein firms might just shock the US population into examining and overturning the laws that idiots like Bill Gates pushed for. Sony and Philips have invested more than half a billion dollar in this 30 person firm and patent portfolio. It is right and fitting that Microsoft be destroyed by the laws they helped create and then used to abuse others. It will be sweeter still if their destruction leads to the end of software patents.
Who am I kidding? Microsoft is going to win, patent law will continue to be available to the hightest bidder and US courts will still be the finest money can buy. It will be interesting but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Shhh! Two weeks is supposed to be longer they you can remember. Don't tell anyone!
The other side you amazingly call ignorant simply thinks that PGE Stadium is smoking crack to declare themselves the owners of all communications in the stadium. Do they think they can pick and chose which radio stations broadcast into the stadium, what cell phone company you can use? How about what newspaper can send repersentatives, or who can take pictures? They are nuts, but maybe you think they are right?
This place could be for you. You seem to like telling other people how to act and think. Do you like it when other people tell you what you can bring to a ballgame. Maybe you fit right in with the other sheeple in the world who don't mind being told what electronic devices they can use, what beer they can drink, what snaks they can pay through the nose for, what adverts they MUST see and listen to, and all that other money grubbing shit that takes much fun out of going to a ballgame. Do you mind being thought of as a "captive" audience?
So, what does that idiot think of my cell phone? Want to buck the FCC there by intentionally jamming the signal Mr. Metz? Why not go for radio and TV broadcasts.
I like the Faraday cage, but a huge discharging tesla coil would be better. When someone's playing baseball, all communications in Portland should fail. They could put it up by the scoreboard so everyone can see that PGE owns everyone else's communications. Don't forget to confiscate pens, pencils, chalk and pointy objects we don't want anyone recording images of the game for later distribution.
The technology is great, but there are obsticals to deployment here that have to be considered. One factor is transportation. If transportation costs can't be overcome, it might be best to toss things into a landfill. Another is how to justify the idea and how it would actually be implemented.
I would expect recycling to cost much more here becase we are so relatively spread out. Japan has half as many people as the US does, squezed into a space smaller than California with a large portion uninhabitable. They are predicting a cost of $25 to the end user who wants to get rid of something. You can't do so much as ship a fridge for that kind of money here, even all smashed up into scrap that has value.
Local manufacturing can make use of segregated scrap, but agian transportation for other feedstocks can hurt them. A secret ingredient of a cast iron drain maker in South Florida was oil filters. They had both steel and fuel! That is a local industry making use of something directly. It can work and it does.
The economic option for the US might just be to make things last longer and repair them. It would be just as easy to force makers of large appliances carry replacement parts for 20 years as it would be to force design changes for recycling. Stability like that would foster a secondary market for parts and support repair men rather than junk men. Either way you look at it, you are interfereing with the free market in a big way.
The justification for this inteference is that mass producers of heavy objects are creating waste that all of us must deal with. Makers of refidgerators and washing machines have been relatively free to profit off sales of tons of toxic materials that must be disposed of. Their feedback from the individuals who purchase may not be strong enough to promote responsible manufacturing. Cars that fall apart in five years are a prime example. Free market forces that worked to the advantage of makers of more durable vehicles have been thwarted by protectionist legislation. The solution may not be to make things easier to knock apart and thus less durable.
Think what the creators of planned obsolescence can do with legislation like this before you back it!
Yeah, you know, I know and he knows. What he's pointing out is that others are misrepresenting this. Microsoft talks about "gatekeepers" exerting control over free software projects, though they have given up the famous bus atack. SCO is playing on the confusion between the Linux kernel and ALL of free software. How else can they make the insane statement, "Linux is an illegal derivative of Unix."? Thanks for bringing up the concept. There are some people who don't understand the nature of free software. Now to correct the confusion people unforetunate enough to have never directly used free software, repeat that 268,000 times.
Sounds hard? Well it is, because there's billions of dollars of propaganda aimed at convincing you that every idea has an owner and is therefore a kind of property. It's ugly when someone like Madonna thinks no one should ever sing her songs in a public place without first asking for permision and then paying her. It's really gaulling when the same people try to convince you that the same thing is true, in however small a degree, of the most widely know piece of free software in the world. They want you to think that even Linux has an "owner" who you owe something too. Correcting this perception is difficult.
The groups aims sound familiar. Oh yeah, there a lot like my LUG's mission statement:
The Baton Rouge Linux User Group's (BRLUG) mission is to advocate the use of Linux both in the home and the enterprise, to support the existing base of Linux users in the city of Baton Rouge, and to have a great time. In addition, we encourage our members to use the LUG as a platform for forming both non-profit and for-profit organizations to better establish Linux within the community. As such, we welcome both business and hobbyists discussions at our meetings and on our mailing list.
The name is a little fancier than "User's Group", but that's what they are doing. Similar things can be found:
What you have to realize is that all of these groups are fighting SCO everyday. Everyday, millions of free software users voice their opinion of the SCO's ownership of Unix, the Linux kernel and everything. Don't you hear them? Neither do SCO's accountants. Microsoft is about the only company that's bought into this extortion. The people who know, think SCO is full of bull and don't waste much time on it.
Reasonable opinions have been delivered by the Open Software Initiative, the Free Software Foundation, Linus Torvalds and the German court system. The local LUG would be happy to talk to you about this, and their mailing lists are amazingly free of Astroturf. Not even Microsoft can buy enough fake roots to cover all the LUGs in the world. It's nice to hear from this OSV, whether you call it a LUG, marketing, advocacy and focus group, or friend of the court.
I have a PC mothballed, but I don't have the power company gift certificates mothballed. An 802.11* access point uses less electric power than a PC.
You can find 486s with PCI for like $5 if you don't have an old P90 sitting around. People put them in the trash. Better still, you can get a pcmcia enabled laptop for $15 on ebay. My P90 thinkpad with Debian runs OLVWM as well as wifi and ethernet card. Seach ebay for "486 laptop", and find a thinkpad in good shape. Better yet, use the one your company wants to put in the trash because XP won't run on it.
The electricity used by a typical old PC is less than the 150 Watt power supply is rated for. If you have to worry about 100 watts, make sure you turn off all the lights and replace your 250 watt monitor with one of the above mentioned laptops and X into your computers. This is not a concern for most people, much less the corporate market the access point people want to sell to.
Kinda hard to drive that piece of shit after someone like me slashes the tires, bricks the windows and lights the stereo, seats and driver on fire, no? Oh yeah, that's if you are nice and quiet. If you blow your horn, I'll cut your nuts off first. Stand out and die, bitch.
I don't like you. I know why I don't like you too.
We might imagine "counsel" for MIT comes from one of the less technically adept Universities. After a couple of years at MIT, they might even get it. In the mean time, you don't have to be much of a tech guru to understand the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act requirements to notify students before the release of personal information such as names and addresses. Nor do you have to be much a lawyer to understand jusritictional issues. Hell, they could get someone from LSU to do that much. What's up with these RIAA clowns? OK, extortionists and music pimps are not well known for their legal prowess either.