But, a proper analogy is that your bread, since it is free, crowded out everyone else in the market place, so that there were very few other products than your bread, and your bread was used for a primary food source for an entire people, and everyone had evolved stomachs which could only accept your bread and products so like your bread it didn't make a difference.
This is a pretty bad analogy of the specific case (clearly I can sell unformated CF cards at virtually no loss to my business - Not to mention companies who sell over a million units gain a $250k bonus over those competitors who do decide to pay).
It's also not such a good analogy of the general case. Since computers are pretty flexible devices. Sure my system mounts FAT16/32 however it isn't at the point where it can mount nothing else. Products like Mount Everything are a clear indication that windows can be made to mount other FS's. I would say that we have a much greater degree of control over the FS's windows mounts than the things my stomach can digest.
Put it another way, if you have a stomach that only can digest my bread then I could charge an arbitrarily high price for the privledge of eating it right?
However do you think MS could charge $100/unit with a cap of $2.6billion? I doubt it. It would take all of ten seconds for companies to see that MS's game isn't worth playing and agree to their own solution. Even if that ment each company writing a patch for every shipping model of their camera.
By the way...I highly reccomend my bread.:-D (3-6 tblsp Maple Syrup to any standard Bread Maker White Bread Recipie.)
But there is something wrong with creating an idea, waiting for it to become so standard that even our keychains come pre-formatted with this technology, and such that any number of 3rd parties provide support for this technology in order to conform with the "norm" (apple, linux, etc), and *THEN* expecting people to pay for it, once it's been entrenched in the economy as irreplaceable and free.
How is this different from any other company giving away any other object/service for free until the market becomes used to/dependent on it?
If I gave away my famous "Maple Syrup Bread" to everyone who walked by my house. Then one day, twenty years later decided to charge $0.25/slice for it. How is that improper?
Personally I'm not convinced that algorithms for filename management actually translate into owning the 'format'. I'd like to see that go to court.
Where were you living when this happened? From the the materials available on the web:
http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/Sun/Sunspots.ht ml http://engr.calvin.edu/PRibeiro_WEBPAGE/courses/ en gr302/Samples/geomagnetic%20storms.ppt http://www .sec.noaa.gov/user_notes/UN30.html
It looks as if the primary outage was closer to a day.
I've been a long time reader of the WINE mailing list and although I'm pretty confident that at some point WINE code will be able to run most Windows applications. In it's current form I can see one blocking issue.
Installers. WINE can install some stuff straight from the CD but not alot. Install shield 6 is a big stumbling block (see: http://www.winehq.com/News/2001-29.html)
This wasn't such a big deal for the current WINE developers who could install applications by booting into Windows. There is an obvious issue if you're going to try to sell this as an alternative.
Not to mention that this sort of thing has been tried before (see http://www.winehq.com/community.shtml under the "related projects".)
Mind you it wasn't all that long ago that people were saying that Direct3D was beyond the reach of WINE and now we have TransGaming.
Anyway if this ends up putting more people and money into the WINE project then I say we're all the better for it.
Ok as I read the posts further down this article I see lots of people reasoning that the idea here is that when using Outlook Express and SAP you can control spam.
Personally I use POP/Authenticated SMTP over SSL. All of these are standards driven technologies and furthermore all are supported by MS Outlook. Why would the bother with SAP? Aside from deliberately excluding non MS mail clients?
First of all I'd like to open with that "I Love OpenSource". It does for me practically out of the box what no commercial product does. For example I own a silly Mac only non-postscript deskwriter. With Linux and Samba and Atalkd my Windows and Macs can both print to it. SFM and other products like it only seem to support postscript printers.
Anyway that said, I notice that many people toss around the idea that OSS saves money. Now certianly it saves me money when I use Samba instead of shelling out for Win2K Server. However in a corporate environment (where you're probably going to buy a support contract anyway). Do the numbers really add up?...or does it's simply balance out? Can anyone give some examples?
This doesn't sound like too lame an idea. However I can see it easily creating a market for better/smarter autodialers.
Which would say to me that a similar kind of neverending merry-go-round which exists between copy protection and deprotection is going to start up between indiscriminate marketing and the privacy conscious.
Anyone know if there's intent to implement some kind of simplified IPC? Similar to DCOP? I'm a CORBA developer and even I think that CORBA presents a fair ammount of work to perform some relatively simple things.
BTW: Great Job on the multilingual!, as someone who likes to have his desktop in traditional chinese this is a big deal for me.
Come on now! Yes I think we can acknowledge that most humans can use tools made by other humans but does that mean that the originator of said tools is somehow to blame for their use?
Should we blame the makers of carpet cutters for those terrible days too?
Furthermore I can't see anywhere in that article where there's anything more than *speculation* that PGP was used.
Is anyone else suspicious about the timing of this article and the one on MSNBC mentioning how the majority of the people think that cryptogrpahic "backdoors" might prevent other attacks?
I'd be tempted to think that somebody is attempting to use these horrible events to further a polictal agenda.
Evolution of customer expectations and software.
on
NYSE Goes To Linux
·
· Score: 1
Go back about 25 years and you would find shareware and even full commercial vendors selling the equivalent of MS Notepad. An application that today everyone takes for granted and virtually nobody would pay for. The customers expectation simply evolved and now there's no going back.
Looking over this article we see that IBM is making money off what is refered to as "middleware" (and probably support) not the sale of the operating system. Which is pretty much the standard OSS-capitalist mantra. Nothing new there.
However taking the way that Linux (and other free OS's) are making money and throw in that most consumer OS sales for MS are pre-installed (which may be percieved as "free"). Perhaps we're looking at yet another evolution of customer expectations.
Is the OS becomming the Notepad of today?
Now this certianly isn't an airtight theory but it does have some interesting correlations. For example think of two ways that software producers responded to the evolution of customer expectations. They created two very distinct markets. One being those who product a similar product to Notepad but with some extra (or simply different or specialized features) which they either give away or sell for a small fee and what I'm going to call the "value added" approach. Where the vendor continued to add features in hopes that the customer would continue to pay for them.
Think about OS's now. Some, free software OS's parallel the current generation of "notepad" vendors in that they produce a piece of software that although is quite powerful it doesn't (on it's own) have all the features of the "value-added" competitors. Certianly you can package the Linux kernel, with GNU software and XFree86 and some custom install scripts and get a great product (perhaps even creating in the process a third variety of software vendor!).
Now look at Windows where each generation has some bell or whistle (from the user perspective) added over the bell or whistle of the last release. They really have no choice if Win2K was simply Win98 rewritten from the ground up. Why would anyone buy it? (rewritten software doesn't nececarily imply better software). So to the consumer a new version of windows is sold on features: 95 had a better UI than 3.1 (among other things). 98 had "internet integration", 98SE had "Internet Sharing". (This is by no means an exhaustive list here BTW)
So where does this leave us?
Perhaps the end result is that the Market is pushed forward but maybe not in a healthy way.
While the VA market is pushed forward toward more and more features the OSS vendors are continually taking the value away from some of those features by providing them for free.
Perhaps OS's like Linux contribute to the bloatware cycle for MS?
Just a thought.
A few things.
a) You seem to be overexpanding your data to make your point seem more important. IOW: 98 and 98SE have little in them that would significantly change driver development. The changes between these two are primarily "feature oriented". Same with the 2000. Furthermore you are citing compatibility with unreleased software...don't count your chickens.
b) WDM is not nearly as seamless as you claim it to be. Although you may be able to WRITE drivers that work on all those OS's this doesn't imply the reverse correlation! In other words that all WDM drivers work on all those products. Since such things simply aren't true. For Win2K I've had to get specific drivers for my G400 and my DXR3 even though Win98 WDM drivers existed.
c) Unified drivers have been proposed several times, just do a search on the kernel mailing lists or Kernel Notes and you'll see that there are lots of reasons they get rejected. Some of them are good, some are performance related, some are religious.
*sigh* Why do these things have to degrade into emotionalism? Anyway...
"If _YOU_ have a child at school and someone reads a letter over another student's shoulder and catches the word "shotgun" and DOESN'T report or investigate it, and YOUR kid is bleeding from a head wound in the middle of the playground because a psychotic student shot him randomly...
*sigh* again. Straw man. You're contriving a situation that is different from the real one to further your point.
Let's try to seperate out some stuff here:
We are not talking about glimpsing over a childs shoulder the word "shotgun". Which would have some level of ambiguity. In which case I think the prudent thing to do would be for the student or teacher who sees this to casually ask "Hey, watcha writing about?". Instead of calling the police.
As I've said your contrived example isn't the reality we are attempting to deal with. We are talking about a web page that had pretty much unrestricted access. Any teacher who viewed the site more than once would see that the aleged "violent" message was replaced with a non-violent one each time it was reloaded. The message was also clearly a quote from someone else.
You are also squarely in the land of "what-if" you are somehow making a correlation between the word shotgun and actual violence. As I've mentioned before (and you have provided no counterexample) if there really was such a correlation I suspect that you would be having something on the order of hourly shootings. If there is no correlation. Why (and again you seem to refuse to answer this question) would you bother commiting resources to investigate such things.
...what would you have to say?"
Well I can tell you what I Wouldn't say. I wouldn't stand up like an idiot and say "Let's investigate every child who uses the term 'shotgun' in writing or in webpage". I would look for a stronger correlation.
I'm sorry. You can scream oppression all day.
Actually, I haven't mentioned oppression once and I might add you seem to be the one screaming. What I have mentioned repeatedly is that it seems really, really stupid to commit resources to something of dubious causality just because I am afraid of it happening again. You might as well hire witch doctors or psychics with that attitude.
That there must always be someone 'applauding' any decision no matter how inane? *shrug* Just a musing...
Anyway that aside lets get back to your post:
"Hey. What the adminitrators saw, likable or not, was "shotgun". End of story. I completely support their decision to get the cops involved."
Even though it was clearly a quote from a book? Even though it was not the work of the people in question? Even though quote changed to non-violent text with every reload of the page?
I really have to question how reasonable this approach is. Do you really think it's sane and reasonable to investigate someone because they quote a book with the word "shotgun" in it and put it on a webpage? You used the word "shotgun" in your post. Why would you be exempt from being investigated?
"Sorry, but I don't want my kids shot in a school. It was a mistake. Big deal."
I don't want to see anybody at all shot. In school or anywhere else for that matter. However do you really feel comfortable endorsing an approach that has NO PRECEDENT WHATSOEVER? (unless of course you can prove me wrong and give me an incident where a child shot someone and the only indicator was a quote from a book posted on a webpage). Do we really have the resources to wast on frivolous investigations? I would suspect that if you were really concerned about your children you would like the time and money spent investigating people who actually have some chance of commiting violence?
"They have to investigate. It's their job, and I applaud them for it."
Very poor logic. If you justify unrestricted police involvement by saying "it's their job". You can justify police making hourly searches of your
houses for drugs.
The point here is that police should investigate however it's got to be on some reasonable basis. If
there was any serious correlation at all between a student having a webpage with the word shotgun on it and actual deaths then I would suspect you would have much bigger problem than you really have.
I think a rational person has
to admit that this was a gross overreaction on the part of the school.
"who takes the blame when kids get killed????"
Perhaps those who promote narrow-minded zealotry and masqurade it as parenting? Who end up spending time and money on systems that tend to prosecute only the innocent? Just a thought...
That there must always be someone 'applauding' any decision no matter how inane? *shrug* Just a musing...
Anyway that aside lets get back to your post:
"Hey. What the adminitrators saw, likable or not, was "shotgun". End of story. I completely support their decision to get the cops involved."
Even though it was clearly a quote from a book? Was not the work of the people in question and the quote changed with every reload of the page.
I really have to question how reasonable this approach is.
Do you really think it's sane and reasonable to investigate someone because they quote a book with the word "shotgun" in it and put it on a webpage? You used the word "shotgun" in your post. Why would you be exempt from being investigated?
"Sorry, but I don't want my kids shot in a school. It was a mistake. Big deal."
I don't want to see anybody at all shot. In school or anywhere else for that matter. However do you really feel comfortable endorsing an approach that has NO PRECEDENT WHATSOEVER? (unless of course you can prove me wrong and give me an incident where a child shot someone and the only indicator was a quote from a book posted on a webpage)
"They have to investigate. It's their job, and I applaud them for it."
Very poor logic. If you justify unrestricted police involvement by saying "it's their job". You can justify police making hourly searches of your houses for drugs.
The point here is that police should investigate however it's got to be on some reasonable basis. If there was any serious correlation at all between a student having a webpage with the word shotgun on it and actual deaths then I would suspect you would have much bigger problem than you really have.
I think a rational person has to admit that this was a gross overreaction on the part of the school.
"who takes the blame when kids get killed????"
Perhaps those who promote narrow-minded zealotry and masqurade it as parenting? Who end up spending time and money on systems that tend to prosecute only the innocent? Just a thought...
Check out Shoujo Kakumei Utena!
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 1
It's a little strange but I find it quite good. Keep in mind that this is Girls (or shoujo) anime. Some info is here
Honestly guys, it's just statistics. I don't suppose that Mr. Katz would like to tell us just what other than behavioural characteristics are you going to use to spot people who are potentially violent?
There's no reason to get lawsuit happy *or* to say that this is the "end of linux" or to advise people to "go back to NT". Such extremism is unwarrented.
The "under 18" was obviously a boilerplate legal thing. Even if they won't remove it. It isn't against the GPL and affects a fraction of the community.
Why is it that half of you act like tightly coiled springs just waiting to rag on someone? All we need right now to make this paranoid fantasy complete is for the opportunistic John Katz to write an article about it.
So instead get a grip, take a nap, have a long talk with your therapist (this means you Mr. Katz). Sometimes the lack of maturity here ticks me off.
Hmmm...What have we here. John Katz going alarmist on us again. Well at least there are some constants in the Universe. Funny how he makes the logical leap between a program that may help people to identify the potentially violent and schools "enforcing widespread conformity". Who says that if even if a student is identified as "potentially violent" that this neccesitates the school to exert pressure to change their behaviour. As usual it isn't the tool that's a problem. What also royaly ticks me off is that Katz makes himself out to be "spokesperson for the different". I suspect most of us were persecuted in one way or another for "being different". Most of us survived without resorting to violence or having a spokesperson.
Jon Katz has taken something that any other person would have either just shrugged or laughed at and used it as an excuse for spewing his own brand of longwinded, innacurate social commentary.
Slashdot Mirror
Cineplex Odeon did this back in the early 90's. Allowing people to rent out a theater to play nintendo. It tanked, big time
My pet peeve is similar. People who insist in applying a unintended context to a text.
Me: "that ending was example of deus ex machina"
You: Stop bringing religion into this!
This is a pretty bad analogy of the specific case (clearly I can sell unformated CF cards at virtually no loss to my business - Not to mention companies who sell over a million units gain a $250k bonus over those competitors who do decide to pay).
It's also not such a good analogy of the general case. Since computers are pretty flexible devices. Sure my system mounts FAT16/32 however it isn't at the point where it can mount nothing else. Products like Mount Everything are a clear indication that windows can be made to mount other FS's. I would say that we have a much greater degree of control over the FS's windows mounts than the things my stomach can digest.
Put it another way, if you have a stomach that only can digest my bread then I could charge an arbitrarily high price for the privledge of eating it right?
However do you think MS could charge $100/unit with a cap of $2.6billion? I doubt it. It would take all of ten seconds for companies to see that MS's game isn't worth playing and agree to their own solution. Even if that ment each company writing a patch for every shipping model of their camera.
By the way...I highly reccomend my bread.
If I gave away my famous "Maple Syrup Bread" to everyone who walked by my house. Then one day, twenty years later decided to charge $0.25/slice for it. How is that improper?
Personally I'm not convinced that algorithms for filename management actually translate into owning the 'format'. I'd like to see that go to court.
Where were you living when this happened? From the the materials available on the web:
t ml / en gr302/Samples/geomagnetic%20storms.pptw .sec.noaa.gov/user_notes/UN30.html
http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/Sun/Sunspots.h
http://engr.calvin.edu/PRibeiro_WEBPAGE/courses
http://ww
It looks as if the primary outage was closer to a day.
I've been a long time reader of the WINE mailing list and although I'm pretty confident that at some point WINE code will be able to run most Windows applications. In it's current form I can see one blocking issue.
Installers. WINE can install some stuff straight from the CD but not alot. Install shield 6 is a big stumbling block (see: http://www.winehq.com/News/2001-29.html)
This wasn't such a big deal for the current WINE developers who could install applications by booting into Windows. There is an obvious issue if you're going to try to sell this as an alternative.
Not to mention that this sort of thing has been tried before (see http://www.winehq.com/community.shtml under the "related projects".)
Mind you it wasn't all that long ago that people were saying that Direct3D was beyond the reach of WINE and now we have TransGaming.
Anyway if this ends up putting more people and money into the WINE project then I say we're all the better for it.
Ok as I read the posts further down this article I see lots of people reasoning that the idea here is that when using Outlook Express and SAP you can control spam.
Personally I use POP/Authenticated SMTP over SSL. All of these are standards driven technologies and furthermore all are supported by MS Outlook. Why would the bother with SAP? Aside from deliberately excluding non MS mail clients?
First of all I'd like to open with that "I Love OpenSource". It does for me practically out of the box what no commercial product does. For example I own a silly Mac only non-postscript deskwriter. With Linux and Samba and Atalkd my Windows and Macs can both print to it. SFM and other products like it only seem to support postscript printers.
...or does it's simply balance out? Can anyone give some examples?
Anyway that said, I notice that many people toss around the idea that OSS saves money. Now certianly it saves me money when I use Samba instead of shelling out for Win2K Server. However in a corporate environment (where you're probably going to buy a support contract anyway). Do the numbers really add up?
This doesn't sound like too lame an idea. However I can see it easily creating a market for better/smarter autodialers.
Which would say to me that a similar kind of neverending merry-go-round which exists between copy protection and deprotection is going to start up between indiscriminate marketing and the privacy conscious.
Anyone know if there's intent to implement some kind of simplified IPC? Similar to DCOP? I'm a CORBA developer and even I think that CORBA presents a fair ammount of work to perform some relatively simple things.
BTW: Great Job on the multilingual!, as someone who likes to have his desktop in traditional chinese this is a big deal for me.
Is everyone as glad as I am that they ditched the pseudo-desktop?
Come on now! Yes I think we can acknowledge that most humans can use tools made by other humans but does that mean that the originator of said tools is somehow to blame for their use?
Should we blame the makers of carpet cutters for those terrible days too?
Furthermore I can't see anywhere in that article where there's anything more than *speculation* that PGP was used.
Is anyone else suspicious about the timing of this article and the one on MSNBC mentioning how the majority of the people think that cryptogrpahic "backdoors" might prevent other attacks?
I'd be tempted to think that somebody is attempting to use these horrible events to further a polictal agenda.
Go back about 25 years and you would find shareware and even full commercial vendors selling the equivalent of MS Notepad. An application that today everyone takes for granted and virtually nobody would pay for. The customers expectation simply evolved and now there's no going back.
Looking over this article we see that IBM is making money off what is refered to as "middleware" (and probably support) not the sale of the operating system. Which is pretty much the standard OSS-capitalist mantra. Nothing new there.
However taking the way that Linux (and other free OS's) are making money and throw in that most consumer OS sales for MS are pre-installed (which may be percieved as "free"). Perhaps we're looking at yet another evolution of customer expectations.
Is the OS becomming the Notepad of today?
Now this certianly isn't an airtight theory but it does have some interesting correlations. For example think of two ways that software producers responded to the evolution of customer expectations. They created two very distinct markets. One being those who product a similar product to Notepad but with some extra (or simply different or specialized features) which they either give away or sell for a small fee and what I'm going to call the "value added" approach. Where the vendor continued to add features in hopes that the customer would continue to pay for them.
Think about OS's now. Some, free software OS's parallel the current generation of "notepad" vendors in that they produce a piece of software that although is quite powerful it doesn't (on it's own) have all the features of the "value-added" competitors. Certianly you can package the Linux kernel, with GNU software and XFree86 and some custom install scripts and get a great product (perhaps even creating in the process a third variety of software vendor!).
Now look at Windows where each generation has some bell or whistle (from the user perspective) added over the bell or whistle of the last release. They really have no choice if Win2K was simply Win98 rewritten from the ground up. Why would anyone buy it? (rewritten software doesn't nececarily imply better software). So to the consumer a new version of windows is sold on features: 95 had a better UI than 3.1 (among other things). 98 had "internet integration", 98SE had "Internet Sharing". (This is by no means an exhaustive list here BTW)
So where does this leave us?
Perhaps the end result is that the Market is pushed forward but maybe not in a healthy way.
While the VA market is pushed forward toward more and more features the OSS vendors are continually taking the value away from some of those features by providing them for free.
Perhaps OS's like Linux contribute to the bloatware cycle for MS? Just a thought.
A few things. a) You seem to be overexpanding your data to make your point seem more important. IOW: 98 and 98SE have little in them that would significantly change driver development. The changes between these two are primarily "feature oriented". Same with the 2000. Furthermore you are citing compatibility with unreleased software...don't count your chickens. b) WDM is not nearly as seamless as you claim it to be. Although you may be able to WRITE drivers that work on all those OS's this doesn't imply the reverse correlation! In other words that all WDM drivers work on all those products. Since such things simply aren't true. For Win2K I've had to get specific drivers for my G400 and my DXR3 even though Win98 WDM drivers existed. c) Unified drivers have been proposed several times, just do a search on the kernel mailing lists or Kernel Notes and you'll see that there are lots of reasons they get rejected. Some of them are good, some are performance related, some are religious.
*sigh* Why do these things have to degrade into emotionalism? Anyway...
...what would you have to say?"
"If _YOU_ have a child at school and someone reads a letter over another student's shoulder and catches the word "shotgun" and DOESN'T report or investigate it, and YOUR kid is bleeding from a head wound in the middle of the playground because a psychotic student shot him randomly...
*sigh* again. Straw man. You're contriving a situation that is different from the real one to further your point.
Let's try to seperate out some stuff here:
We are not talking about glimpsing over a childs shoulder the word "shotgun". Which would have some level of ambiguity. In which case I think the prudent thing to do would be for the student or teacher who sees this to casually ask "Hey, watcha writing about?". Instead of calling the police.
As I've said your contrived example isn't the reality we are attempting to deal with. We are talking about a web page that had pretty much unrestricted access. Any teacher who viewed the site more than once would see that the aleged "violent" message was replaced with a non-violent one each time it was reloaded. The message was also clearly a quote from someone else.
You are also squarely in the land of "what-if" you are somehow making a correlation between the word shotgun and actual violence. As I've mentioned before (and you have provided no counterexample) if there really was such a correlation I suspect that you would be having something on the order of hourly shootings. If there is no correlation. Why (and again you seem to refuse to answer this question) would you bother commiting resources to investigate such things.
Well I can tell you what I Wouldn't say. I wouldn't stand up like an idiot and say "Let's investigate every child who uses the term 'shotgun' in writing or in webpage". I would look for a stronger correlation.
I'm sorry. You can scream oppression all day.
Actually, I haven't mentioned oppression once and I might add you seem to be the one screaming.
What I have mentioned repeatedly is that it seems really, really stupid to commit resources to something of dubious causality just because I am afraid of it happening again. You might as well hire witch doctors or psychics with that attitude.
That there must always be someone 'applauding' any decision no matter how inane? *shrug* Just a musing...
Anyway that aside lets get back to your post:
"Hey. What the adminitrators saw, likable or not, was "shotgun". End of story. I completely support their decision to get the cops involved."
Even though it was clearly a quote from a book? Even though it was not the work of the people in question? Even though quote changed to non-violent text with every reload of the page?
I really have to question how reasonable this approach is. Do you really think it's sane and reasonable to investigate someone because they quote a book with the word "shotgun" in it and put it on a webpage?
You used the word "shotgun" in your post. Why would you be exempt from being investigated?
"Sorry, but I don't want my kids shot in a school. It was a mistake. Big deal."
I don't want to see anybody at all shot. In school or anywhere else for that matter. However do you really feel comfortable endorsing an approach that has NO PRECEDENT WHATSOEVER? (unless of course you can prove me wrong and give me an incident where a child shot someone and the only indicator was a quote from a book posted on a webpage). Do we really have the resources to wast on frivolous investigations? I would suspect that if you were really concerned about your children you would like the time and money spent investigating people who actually have some chance of commiting violence?
"They have to investigate. It's their job, and I applaud them for it."
Very poor logic. If you justify unrestricted police involvement by saying "it's their job". You can justify police making hourly searches of your houses for drugs.
The point here is that police should investigate however it's got to be on some reasonable basis. If there was any serious correlation at all between a student having a webpage with the word shotgun on it and actual deaths then I would suspect you would have much bigger problem than you really have.
I think a rational person has to admit that this was a gross overreaction on the part of the school.
"who takes the blame when kids get killed????"
Perhaps those who promote narrow-minded zealotry and masqurade it as parenting? Who end up spending time and money on systems that tend to prosecute only the innocent? Just a thought...
That there must always be someone 'applauding' any decision no matter how inane? *shrug* Just a musing... Anyway that aside lets get back to your post: "Hey. What the adminitrators saw, likable or not, was "shotgun". End of story. I completely support their decision to get the cops involved." Even though it was clearly a quote from a book? Was not the work of the people in question and the quote changed with every reload of the page. I really have to question how reasonable this approach is. Do you really think it's sane and reasonable to investigate someone because they quote a book with the word "shotgun" in it and put it on a webpage? You used the word "shotgun" in your post. Why would you be exempt from being investigated? "Sorry, but I don't want my kids shot in a school. It was a mistake. Big deal." I don't want to see anybody at all shot. In school or anywhere else for that matter. However do you really feel comfortable endorsing an approach that has NO PRECEDENT WHATSOEVER? (unless of course you can prove me wrong and give me an incident where a child shot someone and the only indicator was a quote from a book posted on a webpage) "They have to investigate. It's their job, and I applaud them for it." Very poor logic. If you justify unrestricted police involvement by saying "it's their job". You can justify police making hourly searches of your houses for drugs. The point here is that police should investigate however it's got to be on some reasonable basis. If there was any serious correlation at all between a student having a webpage with the word shotgun on it and actual deaths then I would suspect you would have much bigger problem than you really have. I think a rational person has to admit that this was a gross overreaction on the part of the school. "who takes the blame when kids get killed????" Perhaps those who promote narrow-minded zealotry and masqurade it as parenting? Who end up spending time and money on systems that tend to prosecute only the innocent? Just a thought...
It's a little strange but I find it quite good. Keep in mind that this is Girls (or shoujo) anime. Some info is here
Sorry, I can't and won't believe the the purpose of FreeSoftware (outside the mind of RMS) is to stamp out non-FreeSoftware.
I would be more than happy to see and pay for a Linux DVD player.
Honestly guys, it's just statistics. I don't suppose that Mr. Katz would like to tell us just what other than behavioural characteristics are you going to use to spot people who are potentially violent?
There's no reason to get lawsuit happy *or* to say that this is the "end of linux" or to advise people to "go back to NT". Such extremism is unwarrented.
The "under 18" was obviously a boilerplate legal thing. Even if they won't remove it. It isn't against the GPL and affects a fraction of the community.
Why is it that half of you act like tightly coiled springs just waiting to rag on someone? All we need right now to make this paranoid fantasy complete is for the opportunistic John Katz to write an article about it.
So instead get a grip, take a nap, have a long talk with your therapist (this means you Mr. Katz). Sometimes the lack of maturity here ticks me off.
Hmmm...What have we here. John Katz going alarmist on us again. Well at least there are some constants in the Universe. Funny how he makes the logical leap between a program that may help people to identify the potentially violent and schools "enforcing widespread conformity". Who says that if even if a student is identified as "potentially violent" that this neccesitates the school to exert pressure to change their behaviour. As usual it isn't the tool that's a problem. What also royaly ticks me off is that Katz makes himself out to be "spokesperson for the different". I suspect most of us were persecuted in one way or another for "being different". Most of us survived without resorting to violence or having a spokesperson.
Jon Katz has taken something that any other person would have either just shrugged or laughed at and used it as an excuse for spewing his own brand of longwinded, innacurate social commentary.