I have never used any (illegal) drugs, and have no desire to start. I think drugs are a problem for our society, with the possible exception of marajuna, which is, IMHO, far less harmful than tobacco. However harmful drugs are, the war on drugs is exponentionally more harmful.
Banning substances that a significant portion of the population wants is beyond absurd, and I thought we had learned our lesson with prohibition. Like prohibiton, the drug war has spawned a huge cirminal underground. Prohibition invented the mob, the drug war is continuing to fund it. Drug Cartels ravage Central America with a practical reign of terror in some countries (the Columbian Army is afraid to go into the southern portion of the country where the druglords rule supreme). In this country, the prisons are full with nonviolent offenders of drug laws, and perpertrators of thousands of drug-distribution crimes, many violent.
This is all in addition to the indignities (blood test anyone?) that even those of us who have no contact with drugs have to face. There is no doubt in my mind that many of the more invasive law enforcement techniques in the near future will be an attempt to find those who use drugs.
All in the name of protecting people from themselves.
Well, I'm just as 'comfy' in my executive chair I have sitting in front of my home box as I am in any other chair in my house, so I would be just as happy reading novels online. I've read The Hacker Crackdown online as have I read many Gutenburg Project books.
Now, when it comes to Computer books, I demand all my material to be encoded in Dead Tree Format only. I find them easier to referance, easier to read, and all around friendlier that way. In fact, I have a pile of books sitting next to me right now, one of which is the GNU Emacs Manual. Now, that book is avaluable in many electronic formats (including PostScript and HTML) online for free, but I paid $30 to the FSF just so I can have it on wood pulp. I doubt releasing a technical book online would significantly reduce its circulation (unless it was very expensive to buy in dead tree (computer books arn't cheap, but I think they generally go for a fair price)). I'm not so sure about Novels and other 'light reading' types of works, however.
That is a circumstance under which micropayments would be excellent.
As I sat here reading this, and desperately trying not to laugh so hard that I get spittle on my screen, I couldn't help but think of what a suit would do reading this post. He would not be laughing. If anything, this post would embarrass him immensely.
That is, I think, the biggest difference between suits and geeks, we can be serious and mirthful at the same time. This guy posted, on a (usually) serious forum, about a serious topic, the most off-the-wall and hilarious comments I have ever seen.
I'm not saying that suits can't laugh, but they wouldn't think that is funny. Why? Because it is not "appropriate" for the subject matter (offtopic?). Just as Suits wouldn't like Write Only Memory, or INTERCAL (two other greats IMHO). Their lives are segmented up into chunks, they read slashdot (not that any of them would) if they want "Stuff that Matters". They go to a nightclub if they want to laugh.
I often hear people tell me that geeks arn't "well rounded" because all we want to talk about is "computer stuff". That's not true, I'll talk to anyone about any technical topic, be it Unix, Physics, History, or a phalanx of other topics, but that's still not being 'well rounded'. Well rounded, to them, is talking about family, sports, and the weather (the weather, not meterology).
I will now make a pathetic attempt to become coherent. What I am trying to say is that we live life, we can take technical things, and serious things, and instead of saying "gee wiz, anyhow, crazy weather we've been having", we examine them, come to understand them at a deeper level, and poke fun at them. We can integerate our lives with human understanding of the world in which we live our lives.
That is, IMNSHO, one hell of a lot more 'well rounded' then conversations about how big franke is getting, if you saw the rams game, and about how some rain would be nice about now.
So, will we be able to choose our own ISP on this box? Is the Linux IP stack left in place? Or has it been replaced by AOL's closed source propriteory stack?
It seems to me that we get caught up in the Evil Empire of the moment that we fail to see the next Evil Empire sweeping in on its tale. Anyone remember IBM? Remember all of the fear and loathing everybody had for them? Anyone see Billg@Microsoft.com comming before it was too late?
I mean, ok, this uses Transmeta's chip, which is really cool, but not amazing. The amazing thing for the Slashdot croud is the Linux base. Yeah, that's cool, it runs on Linux, so it's free, right? The kernel and some of the tools might be, but that dosen't mean that AOL can't lock them into their service with it. Does that seem free? "You can have this box, and it has a free kernel, but, oh, sorry, you have to use AOL for it to be useful."
I'm going to try to use the past here as a guide, lets see, Micros~1 let people use other than IBM hardware for PC stuff (clones) that drove down price and all was good and well, but then, oh no, look out, now Microsoft has an OS monopoly, and everybody hates it. Now, along comes AOL, who says "hey everybody, free OS", and then, next thing you know, an Internet Service monopoly, owned by not only a link provider, but a content provider too (a la AOL/Time Warner).
If somebody can explain to me why this dosne't really suck ass, then please correct me, but from where I'm standing, it stinks.
I first learned how to program in QBasic. I was in seventh grade at that time, and I wrote a rip off of the game 'pong'. It completly maxed out my 386 computer.
After that, I jumped immediently into C. It took me years to get good at it, but once I was, I could apply what I learned to just about any other language, for the simple fact that language writers use C. I would suggest to start them on a very easy and limited language, then let them desire the much more powerful and more difficult languages on thier own.
Yeah, I still love the Dilbert strip and read it every day, but Scott Adams is not a geek and obviously has no real intelligence. That chapter massacared every scientific theory he mentioned. It looks like he saw a blurb about the single bullet theory on MSNBC or something and then tried to write a chapter about it. The book would be great if you tore out that chapter.
Well, I don't like liberals very much (I like guns) but I must say, when one of these judges kicks the can, I would much rather have a Democrat in the White House than a Republican. If the next judge is not a liberal, Congress will have a field day with the first amendment.
Consequently, I think I will make my personal endorsement 'Not W Bush".
Well, there are only two things wrong with Government.
Government tends to fall to the "everything looks like a nail to somebody whose only tool is a hammer" trap. They think they can fix everything witht the tools they have and end up just kinda messing things up. I worry about government on the internet for that reason.
A potentially bigger problem, Government is in bed with the corporations. That's right, regardless of who's technically in charge, industry boards or government agencies, the industry will still be calling the shots, it will just cost a little more to control the government (lobbying with soft money isn't cheap).
I don't think there is an easy fix to this. It sucks any way you stack it. The one hope is that it will get so political that it will get on some political platforms, then, god willing, our elected "representives" won't screw up out of their own ignorance.
Slashdot has been DDoS'd repeatedly over the past few days. Everything has been screwed up, that is (most likely) where all of your problems are comming from.
There have been at least three seperate occassions where slashdot hadn't responded to me at all although I haven't had any trouble logging in.
I've always thought that it would be cool to create a curses based window manager, not emacs, but a true window manager where one could have multiple VTs on the screen at the same time.
Think about it, all you want is to get rid of spam, I personally don't care whether I get money from the idiot who sends me printer-toner spam, I just want him to stop.
This way, they litigate the guy, he'll settles out of court 99.99% of the time, so it won't burden the justice system, he quits spamming, and pays them some money.
They stop spammers and make money, in another light, they make money providing a service.
Yeah, TeX is great. I use LaTex for all my documents, but what about making a WYSIWYG editor for TeX?
I think that would be a great idea. TeX has already proven itself as a great document format. The best thing is that, because of macros and stuff, everybody can kind of go thier own way with it, but the actual file will be readable by everybody because all of their macros will still decompose into standard complient TeX.
Well, I think the guy who pasted it in did it intentionally, but I don't think that the company would have done it on purpose. It was just some guy with a deadline trying to get his job done under pressure. With a shitload of code just sitting there staring at him that does exactly what he need it to do, with little chance of getting caught, he thought he would cut and paste himself across the deadline.
Why I bring this up is because I don't think it will ever become company policy to steal GPL code (if it ever did, they would get caught, ether by reverse engineering techniques or by ethical employes blowing the whistle.)
The point that I am trying to make is that some free software will be stolen, but that is not a problem as it will be remote. And I don't think it will ever significantly help the software companies or hurt free software.
Asteroids can't support more than basic life. Small single cell lifeforms have actually been found on asteroids, but they are incapable of supporting more than the very basic forms of life.
Really? have they? Finding microrganisims on an astroid in space would be a big deal, and I haven't heard of it. Now, if you are talking about the Mars rock in the Arctic, well... there is a good chance that those might be from Earth (I like to believe that they arn't because I am a hopeless space romantic).
If you think that we are going to find anything but microrganisims, you are sadly mistaken. We know that there are no whales in the oceans of Europa just as we know that there are no gnu grazing on the planes of Mars. When we are serching for live in the solar system, we are looking for tiny single cell organisims. Finding one on an astroid will be just as amazing (possibly more so) than finding one on Europa. Remember that live is predominatly these organisims, even on earth. Multicelluar organisims are in the minority and are much younger than their single cell counterparts.
What the finding of these organisims on another planet will do for us is prove that there is life elsewhere in the Universe. We are NOT looking for some place to colonize. The most likely place in the solar system continues to be Mars, and it has its problems.
Why does VA Linux only support Red Hat when they/sell/ Debian? I would think that they would be all over Debian, even to a point of advertising for it as a server OS.
As I see it, GUIs are good for three things: idiots who like to see dancing paperclips, pictures, and games (of course, there are some bitchin' text based games.
GUIs are inherently flaky. Question: How often does X crash on your system? How about your *sh?
There are just too many things that a GUI has to do to keep everything running right. There are too many environment things that can fcsk it up. Now, I don't think that GUIs should be eleminated entirly, I need to play Quake III, but the drive to make everything use gtk, Gimp, or K is wrong.
I like to point at Pine as an excellent example of a curses UI done right. It is outrageously simple (proving that the claim that Text UIs are hard to use does not hold water). My mother would be able to figure out Pine quickly, much quicker than the brain damaged GUI mail readers (exchange anyone?).
I think curses based UIs should be applied much more than they are. I am appaled at Red Hat utilities which use gtk (userinfo and linuxconf for example) instead of curses. There is no good reason why Red Hat decided to do this, and I hope that that is not the way Linux is headed.
I'ts going to go for a hell of a lot more now that it's been on Slashdot. I wonder if Malda has any monatary intrest in it. Slashdot has gotta be great free advertising for it.
My favorite line is "It's the best weather Earth has ever had" on the opening when the Earth is shown with no clouds. I still say that whenever I see an old Universal film with the earth and no clouds.
You don't see too many around anymore. I remember when one could buy a peice of software or hardware and it would come with a 200 page manual. I loved it.
I just got a ethernet hub that came with a 30 page manual (pretty impressive for such a simple device). I read it from cover to cover. The book even went so far as to explain how to crimp RJ-45 cables.
Another good point is that when our LUG had a 'Linux Demo' day at Best Buy, the 'average' (ie not geek) people who were walking up to the table and getting intrested in the stuff generally wanted to buy the distros rather than get them off of cheapbytes or ftp. I asked one guy and he said it was because of the manual. I told him that there is html versions of it on the CDs but he said "yeah, but I can't take it on planes and to parks with me". I think people like dead tree versions more, even so much as to buy a $60 linux distro.
Yeah, actually, I was a moderator just today. One gets five points with which they can moderate a post up or down one point (one post for each post). I get it about every few months or so and my karma is only about 10 or 15.
You would know this if your karma wasn't -(5*10^1000) from making all those grits and Portman posts.
I have a PII 233 as my home box. It is three years old but I have no intentions of upgrading. Linux boxes just don't age like Windows boxes do.
I gave it more memory 32MB -> 64MB, and that really increased speed. I think I might give it more to make it 128, but I expect it to last me another year at least.
I hate the current patent system as much as anybody, but patents are useful. There are some things that would not get invented were it not for patents.
I always like to look at the pharmaceutical industry for an example. They have to spend millions of dollars developing a drug and bringing it to market. Guys in their homes on their computers can't invent drugs for the hell of it like we can software. It is an incredibily long and expensive process. The only way they will get invented is if pharmacetucial company who invested the large amount of money into it can get a very large return. The only way for that to happen is to give them exclusive rights to their invention for a given amount of time (ie. through patents).
I would like to repeat, I do believe that the current system is broken at a fundemental level, but that dosen't mean IP is bad all around, or even not necessary.
If the authors have the right to pull the GPL, then wouldn't they have right to make previously free code closed source?
Say, for example, Microsoft wants to rein in all of the Linux code for which they have copyright (It is most likely quite a bit). Would there be no legal problems with them doing so, thus crippling Linux?
I've always been under the impression that the GPL is a permanent thing, that once code is GPL, no one, not even the Copyright holder can change it. If that is not true, it is a truly frightening prospect for Open Source as there are a great many contrubuters out there whose creations are completly owned by thier employer.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn it! now I'm going to be seeing '?'s everywhere. And it had so much promise, being Linux and all.
I have never used any (illegal) drugs, and have no desire to start. I think drugs are a problem for our society, with the possible exception of marajuna, which is, IMHO, far less harmful than tobacco. However harmful drugs are, the war on drugs is exponentionally more harmful.
Banning substances that a significant portion of the population wants is beyond absurd, and I thought we had learned our lesson with prohibition. Like prohibiton, the drug war has spawned a huge cirminal underground. Prohibition invented the mob, the drug war is continuing to fund it. Drug Cartels ravage Central America with a practical reign of terror in some countries (the Columbian Army is afraid to go into the southern portion of the country where the druglords rule supreme). In this country, the prisons are full with nonviolent offenders of drug laws, and perpertrators of thousands of drug-distribution crimes, many violent.
This is all in addition to the indignities (blood test anyone?) that even those of us who have no contact with drugs have to face. There is no doubt in my mind that many of the more invasive law enforcement techniques in the near future will be an attempt to find those who use drugs.
All in the name of protecting people from themselves.
Well, I'm just as 'comfy' in my executive chair I have sitting in front of my home box as I am in any other chair in my house, so I would be just as happy reading novels online. I've read The Hacker Crackdown online as have I read many Gutenburg Project books.
Now, when it comes to Computer books, I demand all my material to be encoded in Dead Tree Format only. I find them easier to referance, easier to read, and all around friendlier that way. In fact, I have a pile of books sitting next to me right now, one of which is the GNU Emacs Manual. Now, that book is avaluable in many electronic formats (including PostScript and HTML) online for free, but I paid $30 to the FSF just so I can have it on wood pulp. I doubt releasing a technical book online would significantly reduce its circulation (unless it was very expensive to buy in dead tree (computer books arn't cheap, but I think they generally go for a fair price)). I'm not so sure about Novels and other 'light reading' types of works, however.
That is a circumstance under which micropayments would be excellent.
As I sat here reading this, and desperately trying not to laugh so hard that I get spittle on my screen, I couldn't help but think of what a suit would do reading this post. He would not be laughing. If anything, this post would embarrass him immensely.
That is, I think, the biggest difference between suits and geeks, we can be serious and mirthful at the same time. This guy posted, on a (usually) serious forum, about a serious topic, the most off-the-wall and hilarious comments I have ever seen.
I'm not saying that suits can't laugh, but they wouldn't think that is funny. Why? Because it is not "appropriate" for the subject matter (offtopic?). Just as Suits wouldn't like Write Only Memory, or INTERCAL (two other greats IMHO). Their lives are segmented up into chunks, they read slashdot (not that any of them would) if they want "Stuff that Matters". They go to a nightclub if they want to laugh.
I often hear people tell me that geeks arn't "well rounded" because all we want to talk about is "computer stuff". That's not true, I'll talk to anyone about any technical topic, be it Unix, Physics, History, or a phalanx of other topics, but that's still not being 'well rounded'. Well rounded, to them, is talking about family, sports, and the weather (the weather, not meterology).
I will now make a pathetic attempt to become coherent. What I am trying to say is that we live life, we can take technical things, and serious things, and instead of saying "gee wiz, anyhow, crazy weather we've been having", we examine them, come to understand them at a deeper level, and poke fun at them. We can integerate our lives with human understanding of the world in which we live our lives.
That is, IMNSHO, one hell of a lot more 'well rounded' then conversations about how big franke is getting, if you saw the rams game, and about how some rain would be nice about now.
Never underestimate the bandwith of a station wagon full of CD-ROMs, or a train full of mag tapes.
So, will we be able to choose our own ISP on this box? Is the Linux IP stack left in place? Or has it been replaced by AOL's closed source propriteory stack?
It seems to me that we get caught up in the Evil Empire of the moment that we fail to see the next Evil Empire sweeping in on its tale. Anyone remember IBM? Remember all of the fear and loathing everybody had for them? Anyone see Billg@Microsoft.com comming before it was too late?
I mean, ok, this uses Transmeta's chip, which is really cool, but not amazing. The amazing thing for the Slashdot croud is the Linux base. Yeah, that's cool, it runs on Linux, so it's free, right? The kernel and some of the tools might be, but that dosen't mean that AOL can't lock them into their service with it. Does that seem free? "You can have this box, and it has a free kernel, but, oh, sorry, you have to use AOL for it to be useful."
I'm going to try to use the past here as a guide, lets see, Micros~1 let people use other than IBM hardware for PC stuff (clones) that drove down price and all was good and well, but then, oh no, look out, now Microsoft has an OS monopoly, and everybody hates it. Now, along comes AOL, who says "hey everybody, free OS", and then, next thing you know, an Internet Service monopoly, owned by not only a link provider, but a content provider too (a la AOL/Time Warner).
If somebody can explain to me why this dosne't really suck ass, then please correct me, but from where I'm standing, it stinks.
I first learned how to program in QBasic. I was in seventh grade at that time, and I wrote a rip off of the game 'pong'. It completly maxed out my 386 computer.
After that, I jumped immediently into C. It took me years to get good at it, but once I was, I could apply what I learned to just about any other language, for the simple fact that language writers use C. I would suggest to start them on a very easy and limited language, then let them desire the much more powerful and more difficult languages on thier own.
Yeah, I still love the Dilbert strip and read it every day, but Scott Adams is not a geek and obviously has no real intelligence. That chapter massacared every scientific theory he mentioned. It looks like he saw a blurb about the single bullet theory on MSNBC or something and then tried to write a chapter about it. The book would be great if you tore out that chapter.
Consequently, I think I will make my personal endorsement 'Not W Bush".
I don't think there is an easy fix to this. It sucks any way you stack it. The one hope is that it will get so political that it will get on some political platforms, then, god willing, our elected "representives" won't screw up out of their own ignorance.
There have been at least three seperate occassions where slashdot hadn't responded to me at all although I haven't had any trouble logging in.
I've always thought that it would be cool to create a curses based window manager, not emacs, but a true window manager where one could have multiple VTs on the screen at the same time.
Think about it, all you want is to get rid of spam, I personally don't care whether I get money from the idiot who sends me printer-toner spam, I just want him to stop.
This way, they litigate the guy, he'll settles out of court 99.99% of the time, so it won't burden the justice system, he quits spamming, and pays them some money.
They stop spammers and make money, in another light, they make money providing a service.
Isn't that what Capitalism is all about?
I think that would be a great idea. TeX has already proven itself as a great document format. The best thing is that, because of macros and stuff, everybody can kind of go thier own way with it, but the actual file will be readable by everybody because all of their macros will still decompose into standard complient TeX.
Why I bring this up is because I don't think it will ever become company policy to steal GPL code (if it ever did, they would get caught, ether by reverse engineering techniques or by ethical employes blowing the whistle.)
The point that I am trying to make is that some free software will be stolen, but that is not a problem as it will be remote. And I don't think it will ever significantly help the software companies or hurt free software.
It's just not that much of an issue.
Really? have they? Finding microrganisims on an astroid in space would be a big deal, and I haven't heard of it. Now, if you are talking about the Mars rock in the Arctic, well... there is a good chance that those might be from Earth (I like to believe that they arn't because I am a hopeless space romantic).
If you think that we are going to find anything but microrganisims, you are sadly mistaken. We know that there are no whales in the oceans of Europa just as we know that there are no gnu grazing on the planes of Mars. When we are serching for live in the solar system, we are looking for tiny single cell organisims. Finding one on an astroid will be just as amazing (possibly more so) than finding one on Europa. Remember that live is predominatly these organisims, even on earth. Multicelluar organisims are in the minority and are much younger than their single cell counterparts.
What the finding of these organisims on another planet will do for us is prove that there is life elsewhere in the Universe. We are NOT looking for some place to colonize. The most likely place in the solar system continues to be Mars, and it has its problems.
Why does VA Linux only support Red Hat when they /sell/ Debian? I would think that they would be all over Debian, even to a point of advertising for it as a server OS.
GUIs are inherently flaky. Question: How often does X crash on your system? How about your *sh?
There are just too many things that a GUI has to do to keep everything running right. There are too many environment things that can fcsk it up. Now, I don't think that GUIs should be eleminated entirly, I need to play Quake III, but the drive to make everything use gtk, Gimp, or K is wrong.
I like to point at Pine as an excellent example of a curses UI done right. It is outrageously simple (proving that the claim that Text UIs are hard to use does not hold water). My mother would be able to figure out Pine quickly, much quicker than the brain damaged GUI mail readers (exchange anyone?).
I think curses based UIs should be applied much more than they are. I am appaled at Red Hat utilities which use gtk (userinfo and linuxconf for example) instead of curses. There is no good reason why Red Hat decided to do this, and I hope that that is not the way Linux is headed.
I'ts going to go for a hell of a lot more now that it's been on Slashdot. I wonder if Malda has any monatary intrest in it. Slashdot has gotta be great free advertising for it.
My favorite line is "It's the best weather Earth has ever had" on the opening when the Earth is shown with no clouds. I still say that whenever I see an old Universal film with the earth and no clouds.
I just got a ethernet hub that came with a 30 page manual (pretty impressive for such a simple device). I read it from cover to cover. The book even went so far as to explain how to crimp RJ-45 cables.
Another good point is that when our LUG had a 'Linux Demo' day at Best Buy, the 'average' (ie not geek) people who were walking up to the table and getting intrested in the stuff generally wanted to buy the distros rather than get them off of cheapbytes or ftp. I asked one guy and he said it was because of the manual. I told him that there is html versions of it on the CDs but he said "yeah, but I can't take it on planes and to parks with me". I think people like dead tree versions more, even so much as to buy a $60 linux distro.
You would know this if your karma wasn't -(5*10^1000) from making all those grits and Portman posts.
I have a PII 233 as my home box. It is three years old but I have no intentions of upgrading. Linux boxes just don't age like Windows boxes do.
I gave it more memory 32MB -> 64MB, and that really increased speed. I think I might give it more to make it 128, but I expect it to last me another year at least.
I hate the current patent system as much as anybody, but patents are useful. There are some things that would not get invented were it not for patents.
I always like to look at the pharmaceutical industry for an example. They have to spend millions of dollars developing a drug and bringing it to market. Guys in their homes on their computers can't invent drugs for the hell of it like we can software. It is an incredibily long and expensive process. The only way they will get invented is if pharmacetucial company who invested the large amount of money into it can get a very large return. The only way for that to happen is to give them exclusive rights to their invention for a given amount of time (ie. through patents).
I would like to repeat, I do believe that the current system is broken at a fundemental level, but that dosen't mean IP is bad all around, or even not necessary.
If the authors have the right to pull the GPL, then wouldn't they have right to make previously free code closed source?
Say, for example, Microsoft wants to rein in all of the Linux code for which they have copyright (It is most likely quite a bit). Would there be no legal problems with them doing so, thus crippling Linux?
I've always been under the impression that the GPL is a permanent thing, that once code is GPL, no one, not even the Copyright holder can change it. If that is not true, it is a truly frightening prospect for Open Source as there are a great many contrubuters out there whose creations are completly owned by thier employer.
Just a thought.