I think it's about time someone in the states threw their hat into the ring. (So to speak.) Given how SCO was handed it's hat by the German legal system in the LinuxTag suit, I think RedHat may have a good case.
The soft economy scratches the surface. You have to burrow down a few levels to see the truth. Not only is the economy soft, but you have adults competing for the entry level jobs that kids would normally be doing.
My brother has been in and out of menial jobs since leaving the Army earlier this year. A man with a degree and 4 years of military experience is working for $8 and change. And he's spending money on mondane things like car payments and insurace. Have you noticed how compitent the folks at Starbucks have been lately. The sales staff at the Bookstore has certainly aged and matured a bit. And I don't think they are paying that much better.
So until we can re-create the privilaged class of spoiled brats who have nothign better to blow their money on than videogames and CD's I think and discussion on loss of sales due to Y is premature.
For what it's worth, I've managed to make it work, and work quite well.
But then again, I compile all of my machines with a vanilla set of optimization flags. I just use Gentoo for the portage package management system. I also have one machine I do all the testing and upgrades on before I ship that portage tree to the rest of the servers.
Gentoo isn't particularly good or bad. It simply requires a higher level of intimacy with your system. Besides, you DO know everything that is installed on your servers? Don't you?
I second that. I'm running Gentoo on all of my datacenter servers. I'm not as concerned about performance as I am the ability to preserve the operating envirnoment of the machines between OS upgrades.
It takes months to get a mail server properly tweaked, or the delicate Apache installation operational. It really sucks to sweat bullets between living with a root-exploit, trying to re-synthesize RedHat's configuration from source, or praying that everything still works after doing an OS upgrade in place.
These machines need to operate for years at a time, and as frontline webservers, email, and DNS hosts you can't afford to be behind on your patches.
You think censoring is OK as long as you are turning down the volume on the "Bad Guys".
Bullshit. I think the rules should apply equally to everyone. Exactly what political biases are you attributing to me? I hate the liberal every bit as much as the conservatives. But what I hate most of all is GroupThink.
Yes indeed, I believe we should let everyone speak. What I despise are the megaphones people erect in the form of Political Action Committees.
Any message worth sending resonates from the masses. It does not require an amplifier. Indeed, PACs are an idea seeking an consituancy more than consituants expressing a message. It creates a situation of Ins vs. Outs. PACs represent their interest at the expense of the common good.
To Quote:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Lots of stuff about uniting for a common good. Indeed, it would seem that the Consitution was designed to handle Americans as a whole, not in chunks.
Okay, I can here your response now... "You are only scratching the surface, the Constitution states a lot more."
You are right.
Article I describes the Legislative branch.
Ariticle II describes the Executive branch.
Article III describes the Judical branch.
Article IV describes the roles of States.
Article V desribes the Admendment process
Article VI is some legal housekeeping to handle the transition from the Confederacy.
Article VII describes the processes of ammending the Constitution.
So much for any legal arguments there, the Constitution describes the basic structure of our government. Onto the Admendments.
Admendment I - Freedom of Religion, Speech, the Press, and to Peacibly assemble
Admendment II - Right to bear arms
Admendment III - Quartering of Troops
Admendment IV - Search and Seizure
Admendment V - Grand jury, Double Jeopardy, Self-Incrimination, Due Process
Admendment VI - Criminal Prosecutions, Jury trial, Confront, Consul
Admendment VII - Common Law Suits
Admendment VIII - Excessive Bail
Admendment IX - Non-Enumerated Rights
Admendment X - Rights Reserved to States
Admendment XI - Suits against a State
Admendment XII - Election of the President and Vice President
Admendment XIII - Abolition of Slavery
Admendment XIV - Equal Protection, Some Civil war housekeeping
Admendment XV - Equal Rights for all Races
Admendment XVI - Income Tax
Admendment XVII - Election of Senators
Admendment XVIII - The Prohibition
Admendment XIX - Women's Suffrage
Admendment XX - Presidential Succession
Admendment XXI - Repeal of Prohibition
Admendment XXII - 2 Term Limit for Presidents
Admendment XXIII - DC gets to vote in Presidential Elections
Admendment XXIV - Repeal of Poll Taxes
Admendment XXV - Presidential Succession
Admendment XXVI - Voting Age 18
Admendment XXVII - Compensation for Members of Congress (closeing a loophole)
So, there is a lot to digest, Lets first exclude everything that doesn't have the vaguest parts of what we are discussing: namely the rights for organizations to influence the political process.
That leaves us with the following items to consider:
Admendment I - Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
There is also a mindset one enters into with Linux. First off, you cease hording golden copies of CD's. Indeed, you find yourself increasingly relying on the network for the latest version of a package.
A linux installation is less of a building construct than an organism that constantly is refined and renewed. Like the human body, we change out every cell in our body every 7 years or so.
The Tao is the path. The Tao is not the destination.
I don't seem to recall any clause about "1 dollar, 1 vote" or "1 dB on vote." The Constitution protects the rights of Citizens. Legal entities are NOT Citizens. Legal Entities that make a lot of noise are not Citizens. Shell organizations that funnel corporate money into political influences ARE NOT CITIZENS.
All this legislation has done is turn down the gain on political organizations, corporations, and Unions while it turned up the gain on individual voters. You know, the folks who are in the whole "We the People" blurb at the top of the Constitution.
I should also add that in digitial playback, you do copy the data in several forms. That anti-skip feature on CD players reads the information into a temporary buffer. Computers also upload chunks of a sound file into memory during playback. This is so it can pull up what it needs while the disk head is in the right location, rather than wait for the disk head to get back into position when the next chunk is needed a few milleseconds later.
Information is not duplicated during analog tranmission. There is no signal buffer that can be replayed. It's stickly transforming a signal from one form to another. The act of hearing is ALSO not duplication. Your brain disassembles the signal and stores the parts it thinks are important in a variety of ways. You can't jack someone's brain into an audio-in jack and get back the original signal, or even something the sounds like the original signal.
Not really. The idea of a neuron being stricky 1/0 has been debunked long ago. Neurons only have a 1 state. They fire, but only after a threshold has been exceeded on its receptor sites. It then explodes a bunch of chemical bags that excite or repress the receptors of other nerve cells. Nueral processing has as much to do with binary processing as a gunshot has to a light switch. One is an event, the other is a state.
It should also be said that information is not really duplicated in the human brain during processing. It's constantly transformed. You can never play back a thought. It would require tricking every nerve in your body into replaying that exact sequence of events. And even then...
In addition to these laws there were two other classes of laws, all, however, belonging to the same system, which tended to impede the development of the colonies,--the corn laws and the laws against manufacturing. The corn laws in the interest of the British farnier, beginning about 1666, practically shut out from England grain raised in the colonies. This drove New England and New York to manufacturing, and this again led England to forbid manufacturing in the colonies. These laws were far more effective than the Navigation Acts. It is stated that in 1708 New York manufactured three fourths of the woolen and linen goods used in the colony, and also fur hats in great numbers, many of which were shipped to Europe and the West Indies. This trade was largely suppressed by English laws passed at various times. In 1732 an act forbade the exporting of hats to England, to foreign countries, or from one colony to another. It also limited the number of persons a maker of hats might employ. Iron was found in all the colonies, and forges and furnaces were established in many placcs. <b>But in 1750 Parliament enacted a law declaring that "no mill or other engine for rolling or slitting iron," "nor any furnace for making steel shall be erected in the colonies"!</b> After this only pig and bar iron could be made. Parliament also enacted laws at various times restricting the manufacture of woolen goods. These laws bore heavily on the northern colonies, but were little felt in the South, where manufactories were rare.
It's called "write a letter to your Senator and Representative." You see, there is a whole lot that they do not understand. Their job is to listen to you, the people who elected them.
I can't tell you how many times on CSPAN I've heard a congressman cite a letter he/she recieved from a constituant. I have seen first hand how a letter to a Representative or a Senator can clear up some confusion about beuracratic issues.
Indeed if you ask any one of these folks who tell you that Government doesn't respond to my needs, I will bet you that 99% of them have never written to a member of Government.
As far as the $2500 car repair goes, you hit the nail on the head. The issue is cluelessness and the cure is curiosity. I can't tell you how many times my wife calling around for estimates have saved us on the order of $300 or more. (Last inspection in fact they dealer wanted $900 for a brake replacement. The local garage did it for $300.)
Actually the voters in the United States have spoken. New laws are taking effect this year that bar anyone who is not a legal voter from contributing to a compaign. Legal voters are limited to $2000. Granted, folks like Bush can still raise millions of dollars for a federal campaign, but at least they have to get individuals involved.
Of course the only reason it's coming up is because everyone was so disgusted with the 2000 election that anyone who is in office now knows they will not be if they vote against it.
Kind of funny how democracy works. It may not turn on a dime, but it does manage a few quite miracles.
You have to understand the our founding fathers designed the government to be a little slow, on purpose.
In the Middle Ages, Lord would declare just about anything illegal that vaguely represented a threat to their power. Hell, before the American Revolution, England was so afraid of America becoming self-suffiecient (and thus not needing them anymore) they forbade metal tools from being imported or produced here.
Having been on the recieving end of such treatment, our founding fathers decided that government should only tackle the bleedingly obvious problems. You can't put someone away for what the might do, only what they have done, or were in the process of doing.
Frankly, seeing the mess that "preventative" lawmaking makes versus "reactive" lawmaking, I'd take "reactive" any day. The both have problems. But at least reactive lawmaking eventually fixes them. Preventative lawmaking ends up causing unforseen problems of its own.
It may sound like I have my head in the sand, but look at the track record of the Prohibition and the War on Drugs. Now compare that to the hand off (until it was mature) approach congress took with the Internet. Somewhere in the middle would by Radio and Television, which needed regulation from the start because all parties are competing for limited chunks of the broadcast spectrum.
The only people who make money from it are the lawyers, and the companies involved get away with a comparitive slap on the wrists.
Everyone who was wronged by the RIAA should take them to small claims court. Individually. They will either have to field a lawyer for each case, or loose by default.
The Legal System does not discriminate against who it screws.
I'm glad to see someone asking the tough questions. The whole point of copyright law is for a company to have the means to persue others for unauthorized duplication.
Unfortunately with computer technology the very act of playback requires duplication.
The copyright law foreseeing that things are often copied on a small scale by people tossed in a clause for Fair Use. Fair Use was OK when folks copied tracks of the radio, or put together custom casettes. The problem is that people are doing this Fair Use cut and paste en masse.
We ran into the same issue when the Radio was developed. As a solution we developed compulsory licensing. Everyone who owns a radio station (and hence is easily tracked down owing to their FCC license) pays a flat fee to AASCAP or similar organizations. They also track how often the play what songs, and the compulsory licence folks divvy the spoils amoung the folks who got the most air time.
The problem with the Internet is that you don't need a license. Tracking down individual "broadcasters" is a little difficult.
Now the RIAA does have a gripe. But their hands aren't clean either. They have been pushing for exorbinately high fees for internet broadcast rights. They have also been fighting the compulsory licensing scheme for internet file sharing.
The answer has yet to be found. Grabbing congresses' attention is a good sign.
Slashdot Mirror
And to think people chide me for using Linux because I can't get support from a "real company."
Especially in regards to sucking the air out of the opponents.
Do they still have those USB triggers on ThinkGeek?
But just keep that one under your hat.
My brother has been in and out of menial jobs since leaving the Army earlier this year. A man with a degree and 4 years of military experience is working for $8 and change. And he's spending money on mondane things like car payments and insurace. Have you noticed how compitent the folks at Starbucks have been lately. The sales staff at the Bookstore has certainly aged and matured a bit. And I don't think they are paying that much better.
So until we can re-create the privilaged class of spoiled brats who have nothign better to blow their money on than videogames and CD's I think and discussion on loss of sales due to Y is premature.
For what it's worth, I've managed to make it work, and work quite well.
But then again, I compile all of my machines with a vanilla set of optimization flags. I just use Gentoo for the portage package management system. I also have one machine I do all the testing and upgrades on before I ship that portage tree to the rest of the servers.
Gentoo isn't particularly good or bad. It simply requires a higher level of intimacy with your system. Besides, you DO know everything that is installed on your servers? Don't you?
It takes months to get a mail server properly tweaked, or the delicate Apache installation operational. It really sucks to sweat bullets between living with a root-exploit, trying to re-synthesize RedHat's configuration from source, or praying that everything still works after doing an OS upgrade in place.
These machines need to operate for years at a time, and as frontline webservers, email, and DNS hosts you can't afford to be behind on your patches.
Oh god. The terms "Blue Screen of Death" and "System Crash" suddenly take on a much deeper meaning.
What's wrong with you. You are a bunch of cells that are arranged to be born, reproduce, and die. Along the way you buy things and pay taxes.
Bullshit. I think the rules should apply equally to everyone. Exactly what political biases are you attributing to me? I hate the liberal every bit as much as the conservatives. But what I hate most of all is GroupThink.
Yes indeed, I believe we should let everyone speak. What I despise are the megaphones people erect in the form of Political Action Committees.
Any message worth sending resonates from the masses. It does not require an amplifier. Indeed, PACs are an idea seeking an consituancy more than consituants expressing a message. It creates a situation of Ins vs. Outs. PACs represent their interest at the expense of the common good.
To Quote:
Lots of stuff about uniting for a common good. Indeed, it would seem that the Consitution was designed to handle Americans as a whole, not in chunks.
Okay, I can here your response now... "You are only scratching the surface, the Constitution states a lot more."
You are right.
So much for any legal arguments there, the Constitution describes the basic structure of our government. Onto the Admendments.
So, there is a lot to digest, Lets first exclude everything that doesn't have the vaguest parts of what we are discussing: namely the rights for organizations to influence the political process.
That leaves us with the following items to consider:
A linux installation is less of a building construct than an organism that constantly is refined and renewed. Like the human body, we change out every cell in our body every 7 years or so.
The Tao is the path. The Tao is not the destination.
All this legislation has done is turn down the gain on political organizations, corporations, and Unions while it turned up the gain on individual voters. You know, the folks who are in the whole "We the People" blurb at the top of the Constitution.
I should also add that in digitial playback, you do copy the data in several forms. That anti-skip feature on CD players reads the information into a temporary buffer. Computers also upload chunks of a sound file into memory during playback. This is so it can pull up what it needs while the disk head is in the right location, rather than wait for the disk head to get back into position when the next chunk is needed a few milleseconds later.
Information is not duplicated during analog tranmission. There is no signal buffer that can be replayed. It's stickly transforming a signal from one form to another. The act of hearing is ALSO not duplication. Your brain disassembles the signal and stores the parts it thinks are important in a variety of ways. You can't jack someone's brain into an audio-in jack and get back the original signal, or even something the sounds like the original signal.
It should also be said that information is not really duplicated in the human brain during processing. It's constantly transformed. You can never play back a thought. It would require tricking every nerve in your body into replaying that exact sequence of events. And even then...
Yes but it was made illegal in 1732, after Parliment enacted a law foribidding manufacturing in its colonies.
Join the non-sequitor club. We may not make sense, but we sure enjoy pizza!
This is the sort of crap I'd expect from Fark. Right next to the article about the Dwark launched from a catapult.
I was expecting a view viegraphs of products tested, and the sorts of bugs found. No... It was just an Ad.
Though I should have known when I saw an inflamitory headline and only 107 comments.
I can't tell you how many times on CSPAN I've heard a congressman cite a letter he/she recieved from a constituant. I have seen first hand how a letter to a Representative or a Senator can clear up some confusion about beuracratic issues.
Indeed if you ask any one of these folks who tell you that Government doesn't respond to my needs, I will bet you that 99% of them have never written to a member of Government.
As far as the $2500 car repair goes, you hit the nail on the head. The issue is cluelessness and the cure is curiosity. I can't tell you how many times my wife calling around for estimates have saved us on the order of $300 or more. (Last inspection in fact they dealer wanted $900 for a brake replacement. The local garage did it for $300.)
Of course the only reason it's coming up is because everyone was so disgusted with the 2000 election that anyone who is in office now knows they will not be if they vote against it.
Kind of funny how democracy works. It may not turn on a dime, but it does manage a few quite miracles.
In the Middle Ages, Lord would declare just about anything illegal that vaguely represented a threat to their power. Hell, before the American Revolution, England was so afraid of America becoming self-suffiecient (and thus not needing them anymore) they forbade metal tools from being imported or produced here.
Having been on the recieving end of such treatment, our founding fathers decided that government should only tackle the bleedingly obvious problems. You can't put someone away for what the might do, only what they have done, or were in the process of doing.
Frankly, seeing the mess that "preventative" lawmaking makes versus "reactive" lawmaking, I'd take "reactive" any day. The both have problems. But at least reactive lawmaking eventually fixes them. Preventative lawmaking ends up causing unforseen problems of its own.
It may sound like I have my head in the sand, but look at the track record of the Prohibition and the War on Drugs. Now compare that to the hand off (until it was mature) approach congress took with the Internet. Somewhere in the middle would by Radio and Television, which needed regulation from the start because all parties are competing for limited chunks of the broadcast spectrum.
The only people who make money from it are the lawyers, and the companies involved get away with a comparitive slap on the wrists.
Everyone who was wronged by the RIAA should take them to small claims court. Individually. They will either have to field a lawyer for each case, or loose by default.
The Legal System does not discriminate against who it screws.
Unfortunately with computer technology the very act of playback requires duplication.
The copyright law foreseeing that things are often copied on a small scale by people tossed in a clause for Fair Use. Fair Use was OK when folks copied tracks of the radio, or put together custom casettes. The problem is that people are doing this Fair Use cut and paste en masse.
We ran into the same issue when the Radio was developed. As a solution we developed compulsory licensing. Everyone who owns a radio station (and hence is easily tracked down owing to their FCC license) pays a flat fee to AASCAP or similar organizations. They also track how often the play what songs, and the compulsory licence folks divvy the spoils amoung the folks who got the most air time.
The problem with the Internet is that you don't need a license. Tracking down individual "broadcasters" is a little difficult.
Now the RIAA does have a gripe. But their hands aren't clean either. They have been pushing for exorbinately high fees for internet broadcast rights. They have also been fighting the compulsory licensing scheme for internet file sharing.
The answer has yet to be found. Grabbing congresses' attention is a good sign.