Inflexibility is yet another trait that linux users need to come to grips with. As it says here:
[MS FUD snipped]
Quoting Microsoft-sponsored (or not) FUD websites as authoritative on Linux development is hardly insightful, or indicative of any intellectual honesty at any level. Quite the reverse.
Indeed, "what a load of absolute nonsense" you have cited there. Linux programmers are at least as capable of "thinking outside of the box" as Microsoft developers-developers-developers-developers. Even considering Linux (or FreeBSD, or even Mac OS X) requires some degree of thinking outside of the Wintel box from day one. Enlightenment, Blender, Gentoo's packaging system (designing a distro that builds itself from source code, from scratch, to custom specs, on demand is about as far outside of the traditional "binary" box as it gets), etc. are all examples of folks thinking much further outside of the box than any of their Microsoft developer-developer-developer-developer counterparts generally do.
So what happens if they decide it would be a real funny joke to have a video-hack of the President announcing nuclear war, followed by the newscastors reacting in turn? What kind of damage from panic would result? Something tells me this isn't too far off, and frankly, I'm a bit concerned.
Humanity either grows up (people start acting more intelligently, and our "leaders" and industry stop perpetually dumming us down), or we experience havoc.
Probably a little of both. There was a time when people were incredibly susceptible to advertising, and would believe virtually anything they saw on TV. We as a people adjusted. There was a time when people believed everything on the 6 o'clock news. That too has changed, and we are adjusting.
People will initially believe nonsense like this. However, as a whole we will adjust and such hoaxes will lose their potency. Many believed Orson Well's invasion from mars drama... no one would believe such a hoax today.
In short, people's bullshit detectors grow and adapt with these sorts of changes, and the scenerio you paint will be no exception.
Technology moves forward, and the collective psyche (and ability to filter out much of the nonsense) moves forward as well. This is hardly an armageddon scenerio... though I'm sure the Bush administration will paint it as such in order to silence additional speech.
1) Think how much smarter they would've been without.
Probably not at all smarter. I'm not a particular fan of pot (it makes me paranoid; I much prefer a nice glass of 2000 Estancia Meritage), but there is absolutey no evidence it "makes you stupid" and a great many studies that indicate it is quite innocuous, including several fairly recent studies by the US Federal government that were subsequently squashed for political reasons.
Chronic abusers of any drug are another story, however, even there we see far greater damage resulting from alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs. Recreational use isn't terribly healthy (no alien chemicals to the body are), but there is no correlation between pot use and lack of intelligence except in the most egregious cases of chronic, ongoing, long term excessive use where the abuser is essentially stoned 24/7.
2) Wonder how many others would've been without it?
Again, probably none. Anyone who abuses marijuana enough for it to impact their intelligence probably has an addictive personality, and would have substituted alcohol or some other equally if not more harmful substance had pot not existed.
I'm sorry, I don't buy this. If planes are so reliant on all these telemetry signals that a bunch of electronic devices in the cabin could cause them to crash because the pilots cannot possibly look at the instruments, look out the window, and figure out something's wrong, I don't know how any airline managed to stay in business or keep any sort of plane in the air before, say, 1995. Without GPS and the (incredibly consistent) global air-traffic radar systems, why, you couldn't so much as fly a plane over a country with whom your at war to drop a bomb.
It depends on your flight conditions. I assume Cringely is flying VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so if he is a competent pilot familiar with the aircraft, he should theoretically be able to fly his aircraft without any instruments (of course, landing without an airspeed indicator can get your pulse going a little).
However, an airline (or private plane) flying IFR (instrument flight rules) in the soup NEEDS a working attitude indicator and other navigational equipment, as well as communication with ATC, in order to fly safely. The AI allows you to keep the right side of the plane up when you can't see the horizon outside (had JFK Jr. not been such an arrogant, reckless imbecel and had the proper training, this knowledge could well have saved his life), the navigational equipment helps you go where you belong and avoid obsticles you can't see due to clouds, like radio towers and mountains, and the communications with ATC keeps you from hitting someone else flying in the same cloud.
His radio equipment isn't going to affect his gyro and vacuum gear at all (so he won't lose his attitude indicator, airspeed indicator, altimeter, or what have you), but it could very well interfere with navigational and communcations equipment (I've had my cell phone completely jam my comms on one occasion, and while that is rare, it does happen. It happened to me, on the ground while trying to get ATIS, before I turned it off). That could well be a problem if he's flying over a major city talking to ATC and doesn't realize he isn't hearing what they are telling him.
The upshot of all of this? If he's VFR and doing it in an area where he doesn't have to talk to ATC, then, assuming he's a competent pilot who has a passenger messing with the radio gear while he does what he is supposed to be doing -- flying the plane -- he shouldn't have any real trouble. Other than violating various FCC regulations, of course, but that is between him and the FCC.
If he's doing this while required to talk to ATC, he's being foolish. If he's on an IFR flight plan while doing this, he's almost as stupid as JFK Jr.
Umm, there were plenty of terrorist attacks under Clinton (USS cole, 1993 WTC bombing, assassination attempt against Bush Sr., heck you could go on and on).
You've just moved the discussion from attacks on American soil to attacks on American interests worldwide.
If that is the metric, then Bush is even more appalling in comparison to Clinton, which is hardly surprising the way he goes around the world kicking over wasps nests and turning well contained situations (Iraq) into Al Q'aida recruiting free-for-alls and Terrorist Paradises.
The only way your characterization of Clinton's terrorism stance and its results holds any water is if you compare worldwide terrorism under Clinton to American-soil-only Terrorism under Bush, which is an apples-to-oranges (or, more accuratley, a "lets throw out the bulk of the emberressing evidence and mangle the rest to make ourselves look good") comparison.
The public record shows Clinton did aggressively deal with terrorism within the geo-political constraints pre-9/11, while Bush ignored it, wouldn't meet with his terrorism czars and advisors, and spent over 40% of his pre-9/11 presidency on vacation. Post-9/11 he has gone around the world destroying the very alliances we need to win the war on terror, spending a pittence of our strength fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere, while squandering the bulk of our military strength and all of our diplomatic influence to fight a personal family war with the Husseins in Iraq.
The result has been a vast increase in terrorism worldwide (against Americans and against many others), and a heightened level of fear that has allowed the radical right in the United States to conduct an unprecedented grab for power, a suspension of virtually all of our constitutional rights (and a chilling substitution of the word "liberties" for "rights in publicspeak), so much so that we have an unelected president's administration publicly floating the idea of postponing the elections (perhaps indefinitely) on the basis of possible terrorist attacks (tell me, when are terrorist attacks impossible? That's right: never).
The overwhelming evidence suggests that we are witnessing the sunset of our democracy. How any American can support this administration and its tactics, irrespective of their political idealogy, is incomprehensible to me. The degree of denial one has to live in in order to gloss their behavior over boggles the mind (and probably hasn't been seen anywhere in the western world since the days of World War II).
Wow! Its on the "net"? Damn! It must be true then! The "net" would never lie to us!
The net contains more truth than the mainstream media, just as it contains more lies. Both are full of lies, half-truths, and the occasional truth, but the net has vastly more information (good and bad) than the old guard media, and less controlling interests bent on filtering its contents (both to weed out the erroneous, and to suppress the inconvinient).
The old guard media, on the other hand, is easily and routinely censored. Indeed, broadcasters and print media engage in corporate censorship daily, and there is mounting evidence of routine government censorship as well (yes, even here in the United States). When the old guard media chooses to suppress something, the suppressed information often doesn't exist anywhere else in the old guard media. In that all-too-common scenerio, the only place to get the relevant information is the Internet.
At least on the 'net, one can cross-check facts and make a reasonable determination of how likely something is to be true. With the old guard media, we get what we're spoon fed and, worse, accept them as an "authority" on the subject (no matter how unathorative they are... think for example of your typical scientific and technical reporting, and realize that their reporting in other areas is often just as error prone if not outright deceptive).
So yes, if someone sees something on the net not reported at all by the mainstream press, it does deserve further investigation. Particularly if that "mainstream press" is American, where the filtering of information has reached unprecidented proportions for this country.
Is it just me, or do a lot of native English speaking people seem to have a problem with the difference between "ie" and "ei"?
Du hast schon Recht. (You are correct)
The problem lies in the fact that, unlike in German, ei and ie have exactly the same pronounciation. Wierd and Weird would be pronounced exactly the same, unlike schiessen (rhymes with English "sheet", means "to shoot") and scheissen (rhymes with English "shy", means "to shit").
I've never had trouble distinguishing ei and ie when thinking or writing in German, but I still screw them up on occasion in my mother tongue, English.
Would FreeUser (or anyone else) please explain in a bit more detail the objection to the draft Croquet license? In particular, I'm wondering about "an advertising clause that is incompatible with the GPL".
First, I would recommend getting in touch with the Free Software Foundation and discussing this with them. Yes, they'll probably evangelize their GPL, but if you make it clear you are going with a *BSD style license, they'll work with you to make it compatible.
That having been said, basically, the GPL does not allow one to add additional restrictions to GPLed code (which might be added to your project if it is GPL compatible). As a result, the "advertising" clause in old BSD licenses (long since removed by the BSD folks in order to make their license compatible) was removed.
When I say "advertising cluase" I refer in the case of the Croquet draft license to
This not only requires the copyright notice (something required by copyright law anyway, and so unnecessary as part of the license), it allows others to add additional "intellectual property terms and conditions" that could well be GPL incompatible (and, for that matter, incompatible with the intent and wording of your own license if you're not careful. Also, "intellectual property" is a vague term confusing patent law, copyright law, trademark law, and trade secrets laws, four areas of law that are unrelated to each other. It is a term best avoided even in casual speech because of its vagueness, but is particularly risky to use in something like a license. What if I attach a trademark to your project and decide to enforce it? Your own license might require you to comply, in order to use your own work!).
The advertising clause is unnecessary as you can include the copyright notices in your own code as is and copyright law requires they be left in tact, and the other portion of the cluase is dangerous both to your own project and anyone building on it, as another party could add terms and conditions which make their way into a later release and significantly reduce your freedom and the freedom of your users.
I'm neither an attorney nor a license expert (though I work with enough open source and free software licenses to be fairly aware of these sorts of issues), but I once again would recommend speaking with the folks at the Free Software Foundation. I would also take a good look at the FreeBSD license. It appears to do exactly what you're trying to do here, and it IS GPL compatible.
The first question I think you should ask yourself is "Is there demand for such a technology", if not, ask yourself the following question "Can I create demand for such a technology".
I would submit that the popularity of movie trading on bittorrent and other P2P technologies, as well as tivo timesharing (and tivo video trading) is an indicator that people do want video on demand.
However, like television, people expect to be able to get video on demand without strings attached (like DRM, or other crippling technologies that force them to jump through hoops).
I for one vastly prefer watching movies on my big screen tv over going to the theater. Just last night I went and saw Farenheit 9/11, and while I was happy to support Micheal Moore and pay for the film, I was not at all happy with the theater. It was a hot day (90+ degrees) and they chose to save money by not air conditioning the lobbies, and by turning the air conditioning off in the theater (after they had reluctantly turned it on in response to complaints about the heat), until I had to get up (missing several minutes of the film) and get them to turn it back on again.
Fuck them, and fuck their industry.
Next time I'll download the movie off the internet and watch it at home, in air conditioned comfort with a glass of nice wine. I would be happy to pay the same price to download the move concurrently with its running in the theaters, or significantly less to download the movie after its theatrical run, provided what I download can be stored and backed up freely, and viewed under my operating system of choice (GNU/Linux or Mac OS X... I do not allow worm and virus factories in my home). However, they do not offer this service, so on those rare occasions when I wish to see a film I will go where the hundreds of thousands of others who desire video on demand go: bittorrent or one of the other numerous P2P networks.
The demand is demonstrably there. It is the supply that is the problem.
It depends on your definition of "going over." Going over in this context would be betting "too soon"... which make sense, as their are more days following a given date (infinite) than between any given moment and a future date (a finite, relatively short period of time). It is presumably harder to get close to the "real date" on the far side than on this side, particularly with Microsoft where one could always bet "tommorow" and be pretty close, even if off by a day or two.
Confratulations Funkdid. Your guess was the closest without "going over" (preceeding the actual date). You win 9 shiny new patches from Microsoft! (The car is probably a long shot).
Croquet does indeed look very fascinating. However, I read their draft license, and it appears to have an advertising clause that is incompatible with the GPL. I really, really hope they address this incompatibility, as croquet is something that could become a defacto lingua franca of an immersive 3d, collaborative internet. It is something that Blender, for example, could embrace... were its licensing to be GPL compatible.
However, if they inadvertantly freeze out a major portion of the free software world, they will be doing both themselves and the rest of us a disservice, along the lines of the most recent xfree licensing debacle that led to the xorg fork (and xfree's subsequent deprication by nearly every Linux and GNU distribution).
See, here's the problem, Clear Channel can't censor anyone because they're NOT THE GOVERNMENT.
Bullshit.
You are defining censorship as a subset of itself: government censorship. There are numerous kinds of censorship, including a few that are appropriate (parental censorship being one) and many, many which are not, including political censorship (by anyone in a public role), corporate censorship of the public airways, and government censorship.
Clear channel's actions certainly fall in the category of political censorship, which to virtuall all Americans of the non-neoconservative and a fair number of even that ever-more radical group, is considered unamerican. It also falls into the category of corporate censorship, which may be appropriate within the walls of a corporate office, but certainly is not appropriate when applied to the public airwaves.
In this case we are dealing with politically motivated censorship of the public airwaves by a corporation in an effort to silence political dissent. This is an aggregious violation of American values and political tradition (kind of like the last stolen election, and like the quite possibly soon-to-be "postponed"... probably into perpetuity... next election), and offensive to anyone, of any political stripe, who holds any value for our constitutional rights above any one party's ideology of the moment. Indeed, it is no more appropriate to censor public political speech for "economic" reasons than it is to censor expression on PBS, or any other party, for right-wing religiously defined "moral" reasons.
The fact that it is a private company violating and actively suppressing our freedom of speech (whether as a proxy for those currently in the government, or as a misguided private policy dictated by simple greed, or a toxic political agenda), rather than the government directly, is immaterial to the fact that our rights as a people have been suppressed, and political dialog silenced as a result.
This is unamerican in the truest sense of the word, and should absolutely not be tolerated, much less touted as appropriate because one assumes the motiviation to be nothing more than banal greed.
This of course is part of the authoritarians' reelection plan.
That would be election plan. These thugs were never elected in the first place, so they can hardly be reelected. They were appointed by seven of the nine supreme court justices... the very seven who were appointed by earlier, elected replublicans in years past. Cheap political quid-pro-quo in our nation's highest court, the constitution and fundamental democratic institutions of our nation be damned.
One of the worst things Al Q'aide did to America was lend an air of legitimacy to the usurpers currently running this nation's finances and reputation into the ground, and empowering the same right-wing criminals to seize unprecedented power as a result (and call the rest of us unpatriotic when we have the audacity to stand up and demand they stop trampling our constitutional rights).
But seriously, the issue is not, "Can good dining establishments be found in the UK?", or "How numerous are good British-born chefs?". Rather, the issue is, "How should one characterize the cuisine associated with the UK?", either traditionally, OR statistically vis-a-vis current practice. The traditional canard is, "To eat well in Britain, one must have breakfast three times daily."
Canards that are derived from cultural bigotry really shouldn't be touted as "traditional wisdom." Have you eaten "traditional english food" in Britain? How about "traditional American food" in America? (hint: much of the latter is in fact English cuisine, with the "English" label removed and replaced with "American").
I have, and though I only spent a few weeks there, it was sufficient to cause me to reverse the notion I once shared with you. Whether it was shepherds pie, or any number of other numerous dishes, English food is in fact quite excellent. Not as good as Itialian (but then, nothing is.:-)), but excellent in its own right nonetheless.
Now, most people can cite specific examples of fine *indigenous* cuisine traditionally associated with France, Italy, Spain, India, Thailand, Japan, selected regions of the USA, etc.
What is conviniently "forgotten", or rather, obfuscated by my countrymen (I am American), is that the vast majority of traditional "American" food is in fact English food. "As American as apple pie" is akin to saying "As American as the Queen": Apple pie was a part of English cuisine long before America was ever colonized. Ditto for Eggs and Bacon, steak, mashed potatoes and vegetables (fried or boiled), and so on.
We take a lot of credit for "inventing" a great many things we inherited from Britain when we broke away, including much of our cuisine.
But I doubt that the UK is exporting a taste for kidney pie, cornish pasties, bangers & mash, eel, or haggis.
And I doubt America is exporting much in the way of Rocky Mountain Oysters, and I truly wish we were exporting my grandfather's legendary hamburgers, rather than the cardboard McDonald's markets. Every culture has its emberrassing cuisines... citing them as definitive of that country's food is disingenuous at best.
Sorry, nothing personal, but after I discovered just how delicious traditional English food actually is, I was quite annoyed at the apparently concerted disinformation that has surrounded it over the years. I do not like being deceived, and I like seeing others propogate such misinformation even less.
Some guy on slashdot: "...the lion's share doesn't mean the majority. The lion's share is 100%...everything." [ and offers a literary quote proving his hypothesis ]
Some other guy on slashdot quotes assorted "official" sources, each of which has copied the other's mistakes, akin to what reporters commonly do today. C.f. argumentum ad verecundiam (in particular, a quick perusal of various encylopedia and literary sources clearly indicates that the experts, including the dictionaries you cite, are not in universal agreement on this point, so quoting a subset of experts that happen to agree with your opinion, while ignorning the rest, is a logical fallacy).
Having done a little digging on my own (google can be your friend, but a dictionary can be even better) it appears that "some guy on slashdot" got it right, while the various dictionaries you quote in fact copied not only each other's mistakes, but the mistakes as they have propogated into common parlence. As to the 'chicken-or-egg' question of whether the misuse first began among the semi-literate masses, or was spoon-fed to them by the semi-literate media and/or erroneous reference compendia, can only be left to speculation.
I don't think your experiences are uncommon, Americans are used to and expect that kind of treatment. The perception from American customers is basically "I don't care how nice you are to me, as long as the food doesn't suck." There is a level of service expected, but its below what I've experienced in foreign countries.
Or he may have visited large American cities.
I live and work in Chicago, and as an American who expects exactly what you describe (a bit of surliness at the diner if the waitress has had a long day, or a casual 'here you go' when someone brings out one's food in a more casual restaraunt) I can tell you that the staff at most of the stores (Jewel, Osco, Wallgreens, etc.) is absolutely appalling. Rudeness to redefine the term. You are a bug in their dirty ointment, a smear on their windshield as they assault their way through their workday, a worm to be despised.
In short, they feel (from their point of view, they "know") they are entitled to their job, they are entitled to their pay, and your presence as a paying customer needing service is an irritant they shouldn't have to endure simply to get the paycheck which is their God Given Right(tm). Spoiled, arrogant, entitlement children (many of adult age).
Buying groceries, you will be lucky if any words are spoken to you beyond "Ninety five thirty one." ("...is your total" is optional and generaly left off. As for "please", "thank you", or even a gruff "hello"... not in a thousand years.) My girlfriend and I actively avoid buying things at these stores. We go out of our way (and pay a little extra) to shop at our local neighborhood pharmacy, despite its lower selection, and we use Peapod to have our groceries delivered (initially to avoid dealing with the dehumanizing experience of being treated as vermin by a minimum-wage earning illiterate jackass at Jewel, now for the convinience of never facing lines at a checkout).
Smaller cities and towns have less of this in my experience, but in downtown Chicago civilized service, much less polite service, is virtually unheard of outside of the high-end department stores. (Restaurants are the exception, as they are working for tips. But go to a McDonalds or Wendy's and you'll discover just how quickly you become a worm once again.) What is even more appalling than the fact that these people do not get fired for this behavior (indeed, some of them, based upon their skills, should be unemployable without serious remedial training, and perhaps shock therapy), is that so many people are quite willing to give the businesses their money anyway.
As for why you'd need a license for this, it may the case that MS has a number of pending patents on the concept (orginally termed Caller ID) and the license mentioned prior is meant to assure people that if this makes it out there as a standard, they will have a license to practice with having to pay royalties.
Rather than give tacit support of software licenses to Microsoft (or anyone else), I'd rather just locate my DNS and mail server overseas, in a sane regime that doesn't recognize software patents, and use SPF irrespective of Microsofts intellectual property grab.
Microsoft obviously didn't invent anything here (the SPF folks did)... they certainly should not be given government monopoly entitlements to the concept, nor if our corrupt government does grant them such entitlements, should anyone respect it. Locate the infrastructure off shore instead.
But unlike telcos, ISPs provide more than a wire. They provide services, such as email and DNS. Using your logic, I could see that an ISP, as a common carrier, would have to carry the spam, but as a service provider could then very well not deliver it. It's mildly similar to call-blocking features sold by the telcos. Sound reasonable?
It actually is simpler than that.
Define ISPs as common carriers (after all, in 99.999% of the cases that is effectively what they are, and any other course leads to a madhouse of government regulation and oversight).
Define SPAM to be illegal, just as SPAM faxes are illegal, and just as obscene and threatening phone calls are illegal.
Then, place enforcement where it belongs, with the authorities (who can require cooperation from ISPs), not the ISPs themselves, who should be in the business of providing connectivity and services, not enforcing the law.
Those services, as you correctly point out, would (and already do) logically include mail filtering software of varying quality.
Of course it is. Every black object in the world reflects some light.
You are confusing black bodies, an abstract notion defined by physiscists which does not exist in the real, physical world, and the color black, which our eyes percieve just fine whether or not it is a shiny surface with a lot of reflection, or a matted surface with minimal (but still greater than zero) reflection. The black BMW I had the misfortune of following the other day positively glinted in the midday sun.
With light, black is defined as the abscence of color. With pigment, black is the presenece of all color (analogous to white light).
FL600 makes sense in the context of the story, since it's the upper bound of controlled airspace.
Not any longer. Post 9/11 the FAA redefined the airspace above FL600 as Class E, rather than Class G. A subtle but important difference... before 9/11 one could technically enter the airspace from above or the sides without permission (ADIZ issues aside), now anyone on an instrument flight plan (required to get aloft through the Class A airspace beneath), has to be in contact with ATC.
Of course, at the time this story was written, that wasn't the case...and once you're free of the earth's gravitational well, well, the FAA doesn't have a lot of wherewithall to enforce their authority anyway, nor ATC a great deal of interest in vectoring your flight.
Sec. 71.71 Class E airspace.
Class E Airspace consists of:
(a) The airspace of the United States, including that airspace overlying the waters within 12 nautical miles of the coast of the 48 contiguous states and Alaska, extending upward from 14,500 feet MSL up to, but not including 18,000 feet MSL, and the airspace above FL600, excluding--
(1) The Alaska peninsula west of longitude 160 deg.00'00"W.; and
(2) The airspace below 1,500 feet above the surface of the earth.
Growing up, I approved of the Republicans- being a fiscal conservative and all.
I too am fiscally conservative.
What is interesting, if one looks at the history of Repubican vs. Democratic spending over the last 80 years, one finds that the Democrats are actually far more fiscally responsible than the Republicans.
However, the Republicans have been far more successful at propogating the appearance of being fiscally responsible in the uninformed public's eye, largely as a result of their spending of trillions on defense and assorted industrial pork projects, while the Democrats spend mere billions on social programs and assorted industrial pork.
In other words, one party spends pennies on the dollar on the poor, while the other stuffs dollars on the dollar into the pockets of the wealthy, yet the party wasting record amounts of money (for the second time in three decades) and running up record deficits (again, for the second time in three decades) maintains the reputation for being fiscally responsible simply by brazenly preaching fiscal responsibility while refusing to follow their own advice.
It is strange indeed, the mentality of America in which giving pennies to the poor is seen as far more wasteful than handing dollars hand over fist to the rich.
The Republicans need to do more than become a lot more liberal on social issues. They need to learn how to budget... and while the Democrats could learn a little more restraint, they at least keep their spending within reasonable boundries, in stark constrast to the Republicans.
All that having been said, the Democrats are nearly as bad as the Republicans on the IP front... equally as bad, were it not for the Republicans penchant for adding direct censorship in the name of "the children" on top of the more subtle but equally real censorship both parties favor in the name of copyright.
At what point then could we just download 'plans' off P2P and just 'grow' our own car, house, dinner....
At the point where the ruling oligarchs choose to relinquish their architectures of control (patent and copyright law) and allow knowledge and thought to be shared freely.
I.e. not in the lifetime of anyone currently living, if ever.
Expect nano-designs to be covered by both patents and copyrights, much like software in America is today. And expect progress to be decimated as a result, and the best products to be created in technical violation of the law in many places, such as mplayer is today (though fortunately not in violation of the laws where its author lives).
And the latter, semi-optomistic note, assumes there are safe havens where free thinking people can still create... probably far away from the United States or Europe. If "harmonization" succeeds, there will be no such place, and the only products and creativity that will exist will be the glacially slow change industry offers us... assuming they don't see any threat to their current revinue streams in offering the new product. There will be no innovation from outside, and with government mandated monopoly markets, no competition either.
I love how the submitter is so blatantly trying to get everyone riled up with that quote (oh no, thought crime!), when in fact that quote is actually just a direct translation of Article 12 of the Brazilian Press Law.
So, the fact that brazilian law has written into it the notion of thought crimes means Microsoft's attempt to apply the definition of thought crime to its critics in a court of law an effort to declare their critics' spoken thoughts crimes doesn't represent Microsoft's stance on the issue?
Come on, spare us the Microsoft spin. Those who exploit and enforce unjust laws are no less unjust or evil themselves simply because the law itself exists and is on the books. Just ask anyone who spent the time as the wrong ethnicity at the wrong time in Iran, Iraq, Cambodia, Serbia, Spain, France, Germany, the United States, or several dozen other places.
The filing is in fact very revealing of Microsoft's mentality on the matter... were it not, they never would have filed the case in the manner in which they did. Their quotation of that particularly noxious clause in the law underscores their take on their critic's criticisms.
Brazilian law defines the existence of thought crimes (probably dating back to the military junta there).
Microsoft wants any criticism of its cartel-like behavior and marketing strategies to be branded a thought crime under Brazilian law.
This, irrespective of the truth of the assertions being made, that their ploy does indeed bear remarkable similiarity to the marketing methods of the drug cartels.
If I say that Microsoft's is akin to those of the Maifa, that there licensing schemes are more like the fifdom taxation scheme of Ole England, and that their very existence threatens innovation and the advancement of technology, would I get sued too? I guess I'd have to say those things in a public forum, and be in the position to influence thebuing decisions on thousands, if not millions of people. Kinda like/.
If you are in the United States you are safe (not from being sued, but from losing). Truth is an absolute defense, regardless of how damaging it may be. And every word you wrote is true.
Caveate: the truth used to set you free, pre-Bush/Chaney/Rumsfeld/Rice. These days, all bets are off, domestic or foreign.
Yes, but the thing is -- once you use GNU/Linux, you don't *want* to use other stuff -- but that's okay, because you can download all the GNU/Linux you want for free and will always be able to do so.
You are absolutely right, and here is the key difference between GNU and Microsoft:
With Microsoft, you have customer lock-in that actively discourages and often prevents a customer from chosing another system they would otherwise prefer. Evidence of this abounds in virtually every medium one might consider, from the opinion pages of Chicago newspapers to court filings in assorted lawsuits against Microsoft brought by companies and governments large and small, to the pages of the World Wide Web. Customer lock-in is real, destructive, and most importantly to a democratic government: non-democratic (ie choice is removed).
GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and other free software do not lock anyone in. Indeed, many free applications have been ported to Microsoft's inferior platform because people wanted to run the software and needed to keep running windows (quite probably due to customer lock-in).
The difference? With GNU/Linux you have the choice, even the choice to chose bondage to a large American corporate entity (read: run Windows). With Microsoft, you have no such choice: you are locked quite firmly in regardless of your other desires...with the only possible way out to dump Microsoft products completely.
The wisdom of such a choice is incontravertable, whether one is considering software quality, security, stability, or freedom, but that doesn't mean one has the ability to make such a choice, of one's data is already beholden to the behemoth. Even more so, now that Microsoft appears to be taking the $CO path more directly these days ("no customer, and especially no ex-customer, is safe").
Slashdot Mirror
Inflexibility is yet another trait that linux users need to come to grips with. As it says here:
[MS FUD snipped]
Quoting Microsoft-sponsored (or not) FUD websites as authoritative on Linux development is hardly insightful, or indicative of any intellectual honesty at any level. Quite the reverse.
Indeed, "what a load of absolute nonsense" you have cited there. Linux programmers are at least as capable of "thinking outside of the box" as Microsoft developers-developers-developers-developers. Even considering Linux (or FreeBSD, or even Mac OS X) requires some degree of thinking outside of the Wintel box from day one. Enlightenment, Blender, Gentoo's packaging system (designing a distro that builds itself from source code, from scratch, to custom specs, on demand is about as far outside of the traditional "binary" box as it gets), etc. are all examples of folks thinking much further outside of the box than any of their Microsoft developer-developer-developer-developer counterparts generally do.
So what happens if they decide it would be a real funny joke to have a video-hack of the President announcing nuclear war, followed by the newscastors reacting in turn? What kind of damage from panic would result? Something tells me this isn't too far off, and frankly, I'm a bit concerned.
... no one would believe such a hoax today.
... though I'm sure the Bush administration will paint it as such in order to silence additional speech.
Humanity either grows up (people start acting more intelligently, and our "leaders" and industry stop perpetually dumming us down), or we experience havoc.
Probably a little of both. There was a time when people were incredibly susceptible to advertising, and would believe virtually anything they saw on TV. We as a people adjusted. There was a time when people believed everything on the 6 o'clock news. That too has changed, and we are adjusting.
People will initially believe nonsense like this. However, as a whole we will adjust and such hoaxes will lose their potency. Many believed Orson Well's invasion from mars drama
In short, people's bullshit detectors grow and adapt with these sorts of changes, and the scenerio you paint will be no exception.
Technology moves forward, and the collective psyche (and ability to filter out much of the nonsense) moves forward as well. This is hardly an armageddon scenerio
1) Think how much smarter they would've been without.
Probably not at all smarter. I'm not a particular fan of pot (it makes me paranoid; I much prefer a nice glass of 2000 Estancia Meritage), but there is absolutey no evidence it "makes you stupid" and a great many studies that indicate it is quite innocuous, including several fairly recent studies by the US Federal government that were subsequently squashed for political reasons.
Chronic abusers of any drug are another story, however, even there we see far greater damage resulting from alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs. Recreational use isn't terribly healthy (no alien chemicals to the body are), but there is no correlation between pot use and lack of intelligence except in the most egregious cases of chronic, ongoing, long term excessive use where the abuser is essentially stoned 24/7.
2) Wonder how many others would've been without it?
Again, probably none. Anyone who abuses marijuana enough for it to impact their intelligence probably has an addictive personality, and would have substituted alcohol or some other equally if not more harmful substance had pot not existed.
I'm sorry, I don't buy this. If planes are so reliant on all these telemetry signals that a bunch of electronic devices in the cabin could cause them to crash because the pilots cannot possibly look at the instruments, look out the window, and figure out something's wrong, I don't know how any airline managed to stay in business or keep any sort of plane in the air before, say, 1995. Without GPS and the (incredibly consistent) global air-traffic radar systems, why, you couldn't so much as fly a plane over a country with whom your at war to drop a bomb.
It depends on your flight conditions. I assume Cringely is flying VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so if he is a competent pilot familiar with the aircraft, he should theoretically be able to fly his aircraft without any instruments (of course, landing without an airspeed indicator can get your pulse going a little).
However, an airline (or private plane) flying IFR (instrument flight rules) in the soup NEEDS a working attitude indicator and other navigational equipment, as well as communication with ATC, in order to fly safely. The AI allows you to keep the right side of the plane up when you can't see the horizon outside (had JFK Jr. not been such an arrogant, reckless imbecel and had the proper training, this knowledge could well have saved his life), the navigational equipment helps you go where you belong and avoid obsticles you can't see due to clouds, like radio towers and mountains, and the communications with ATC keeps you from hitting someone else flying in the same cloud.
His radio equipment isn't going to affect his gyro and vacuum gear at all (so he won't lose his attitude indicator, airspeed indicator, altimeter, or what have you), but it could very well interfere with navigational and communcations equipment (I've had my cell phone completely jam my comms on one occasion, and while that is rare, it does happen. It happened to me, on the ground while trying to get ATIS, before I turned it off). That could well be a problem if he's flying over a major city talking to ATC and doesn't realize he isn't hearing what they are telling him.
The upshot of all of this? If he's VFR and doing it in an area where he doesn't have to talk to ATC, then, assuming he's a competent pilot who has a passenger messing with the radio gear while he does what he is supposed to be doing -- flying the plane -- he shouldn't have any real trouble. Other than violating various FCC regulations, of course, but that is between him and the FCC.
If he's doing this while required to talk to ATC, he's being foolish. If he's on an IFR flight plan while doing this, he's almost as stupid as JFK Jr.
My bet is on the first scenerio.
Umm, there were plenty of terrorist attacks under Clinton (USS cole, 1993 WTC bombing, assassination attempt against Bush Sr., heck you could go on and on).
You've just moved the discussion from attacks on American soil to attacks on American interests worldwide.
If that is the metric, then Bush is even more appalling in comparison to Clinton, which is hardly surprising the way he goes around the world kicking over wasps nests and turning well contained situations (Iraq) into Al Q'aida recruiting free-for-alls and Terrorist Paradises.
The only way your characterization of Clinton's terrorism stance and its results holds any water is if you compare worldwide terrorism under Clinton to American-soil-only Terrorism under Bush, which is an apples-to-oranges (or, more accuratley, a "lets throw out the bulk of the emberressing evidence and mangle the rest to make ourselves look good") comparison.
The public record shows Clinton did aggressively deal with terrorism within the geo-political constraints pre-9/11, while Bush ignored it, wouldn't meet with his terrorism czars and advisors, and spent over 40% of his pre-9/11 presidency on vacation. Post-9/11 he has gone around the world destroying the very alliances we need to win the war on terror, spending a pittence of our strength fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere, while squandering the bulk of our military strength and all of our diplomatic influence to fight a personal family war with the Husseins in Iraq.
The result has been a vast increase in terrorism worldwide (against Americans and against many others), and a heightened level of fear that has allowed the radical right in the United States to conduct an unprecedented grab for power, a suspension of virtually all of our constitutional rights (and a chilling substitution of the word "liberties" for "rights in publicspeak), so much so that we have an unelected president's administration publicly floating the idea of postponing the elections (perhaps indefinitely) on the basis of possible terrorist attacks (tell me, when are terrorist attacks impossible? That's right: never).
The overwhelming evidence suggests that we are witnessing the sunset of our democracy. How any American can support this administration and its tactics, irrespective of their political idealogy, is incomprehensible to me. The degree of denial one has to live in in order to gloss their behavior over boggles the mind (and probably hasn't been seen anywhere in the western world since the days of World War II).
Wow! Its on the "net"? Damn! It must be true then! The "net" would never lie to us!
... think for example of your typical scientific and technical reporting, and realize that their reporting in other areas is often just as error prone if not outright deceptive).
The net contains more truth than the mainstream media, just as it contains more lies. Both are full of lies, half-truths, and the occasional truth, but the net has vastly more information (good and bad) than the old guard media, and less controlling interests bent on filtering its contents (both to weed out the erroneous, and to suppress the inconvinient).
The old guard media, on the other hand, is easily and routinely censored. Indeed, broadcasters and print media engage in corporate censorship daily, and there is mounting evidence of routine government censorship as well (yes, even here in the United States). When the old guard media chooses to suppress something, the suppressed information often doesn't exist anywhere else in the old guard media. In that all-too-common scenerio, the only place to get the relevant information is the Internet.
At least on the 'net, one can cross-check facts and make a reasonable determination of how likely something is to be true. With the old guard media, we get what we're spoon fed and, worse, accept them as an "authority" on the subject (no matter how unathorative they are
So yes, if someone sees something on the net not reported at all by the mainstream press, it does deserve further investigation. Particularly if that "mainstream press" is American, where the filtering of information has reached unprecidented proportions for this country.
Is it just me, or do a lot of native English speaking people seem to have a problem with the difference between "ie" and "ei"?
Du hast schon Recht. (You are correct)
The problem lies in the fact that, unlike in German, ei and ie have exactly the same pronounciation. Wierd and Weird would be pronounced exactly the same, unlike schiessen (rhymes with English "sheet", means "to shoot") and scheissen (rhymes with English "shy", means "to shit").
I've never had trouble distinguishing ei and ie when thinking or writing in German, but I still screw them up on occasion in my mother tongue, English.
First, I would recommend getting in touch with the Free Software Foundation and discussing this with them. Yes, they'll probably evangelize their GPL, but if you make it clear you are going with a *BSD style license, they'll work with you to make it compatible.
That having been said, basically, the GPL does not allow one to add additional restrictions to GPLed code (which might be added to your project if it is GPL compatible). As a result, the "advertising" clause in old BSD licenses (long since removed by the BSD folks in order to make their license compatible) was removed.
When I say "advertising cluase" I refer in the case of the Croquet draft license to
This not only requires the copyright notice (something required by copyright law anyway, and so unnecessary as part of the license), it allows others to add additional "intellectual property terms and conditions" that could well be GPL incompatible (and, for that matter, incompatible with the intent and wording of your own license if you're not careful. Also, "intellectual property" is a vague term confusing patent law, copyright law, trademark law, and trade secrets laws, four areas of law that are unrelated to each other. It is a term best avoided even in casual speech because of its vagueness, but is particularly risky to use in something like a license. What if I attach a trademark to your project and decide to enforce it? Your own license might require you to comply, in order to use your own work!).
The advertising clause is unnecessary as you can include the copyright notices in your own code as is and copyright law requires they be left in tact, and the other portion of the cluase is dangerous both to your own project and anyone building on it, as another party could add terms and conditions which make their way into a later release and significantly reduce your freedom and the freedom of your users.
I'm neither an attorney nor a license expert (though I work with enough open source and free software licenses to be fairly aware of these sorts of issues), but I once again would recommend speaking with the folks at the Free Software Foundation. I would also take a good look at the FreeBSD license. It appears to do exactly what you're trying to do here, and it IS GPL compatible.
Good luck!
The first question I think you should ask yourself is "Is there demand for such a technology", if not, ask yourself the following question "Can I create demand for such a technology".
... I do not allow worm and virus factories in my home). However, they do not offer this service, so on those rare occasions when I wish to see a film I will go where the hundreds of thousands of others who desire video on demand go: bittorrent or one of the other numerous P2P networks.
I would submit that the popularity of movie trading on bittorrent and other P2P technologies, as well as tivo timesharing (and tivo video trading) is an indicator that people do want video on demand.
However, like television, people expect to be able to get video on demand without strings attached (like DRM, or other crippling technologies that force them to jump through hoops).
I for one vastly prefer watching movies on my big screen tv over going to the theater. Just last night I went and saw Farenheit 9/11, and while I was happy to support Micheal Moore and pay for the film, I was not at all happy with the theater. It was a hot day (90+ degrees) and they chose to save money by not air conditioning the lobbies, and by turning the air conditioning off in the theater (after they had reluctantly turned it on in response to complaints about the heat), until I had to get up (missing several minutes of the film) and get them to turn it back on again.
Fuck them, and fuck their industry.
Next time I'll download the movie off the internet and watch it at home, in air conditioned comfort with a glass of nice wine. I would be happy to pay the same price to download the move concurrently with its running in the theaters, or significantly less to download the movie after its theatrical run, provided what I download can be stored and backed up freely, and viewed under my operating system of choice (GNU/Linux or Mac OS X
The demand is demonstrably there. It is the supply that is the problem.
His bet did go over.
... which make sense, as their are more days following a given date (infinite) than between any given moment and a future date (a finite, relatively short period of time). It is presumably harder to get close to the "real date" on the far side than on this side, particularly with Microsoft where one could always bet "tommorow" and be pretty close, even if off by a day or two.
Sorry, no new car for Funkdid!
It depends on your definition of "going over." Going over in this context would be betting "too soon"
Confratulations Funkdid. Your guess was the closest without "going over" (preceeding the actual date). You win 9 shiny new patches from Microsoft! (The car is probably a long shot).
Croquet does indeed look very fascinating. However, I read their draft license, and it appears to have an advertising clause that is incompatible with the GPL. I really, really hope they address this incompatibility, as croquet is something that could become a defacto lingua franca of an immersive 3d, collaborative internet. It is something that Blender, for example, could embrace ... were its licensing to be GPL compatible.
However, if they inadvertantly freeze out a major portion of the free software world, they will be doing both themselves and the rest of us a disservice, along the lines of the most recent xfree licensing debacle that led to the xorg fork (and xfree's subsequent deprication by nearly every Linux and GNU distribution).
That would be a terrible shame.
See, here's the problem, Clear Channel can't censor anyone because they're NOT THE GOVERNMENT.
... probably into perpetuity ... next election), and offensive to anyone, of any political stripe, who holds any value for our constitutional rights above any one party's ideology of the moment. Indeed, it is no more appropriate to censor public political speech for "economic" reasons than it is to censor expression on PBS, or any other party, for right-wing religiously defined "moral" reasons.
Bullshit.
You are defining censorship as a subset of itself: government censorship. There are numerous kinds of censorship, including a few that are appropriate (parental censorship being one) and many, many which are not, including political censorship (by anyone in a public role), corporate censorship of the public airways, and government censorship.
Clear channel's actions certainly fall in the category of political censorship, which to virtuall all Americans of the non-neoconservative and a fair number of even that ever-more radical group, is considered unamerican. It also falls into the category of corporate censorship, which may be appropriate within the walls of a corporate office, but certainly is not appropriate when applied to the public airwaves.
In this case we are dealing with politically motivated censorship of the public airwaves by a corporation in an effort to silence political dissent. This is an aggregious violation of American values and political tradition (kind of like the last stolen election, and like the quite possibly soon-to-be "postponed"
The fact that it is a private company violating and actively suppressing our freedom of speech (whether as a proxy for those currently in the government, or as a misguided private policy dictated by simple greed, or a toxic political agenda), rather than the government directly, is immaterial to the fact that our rights as a people have been suppressed, and political dialog silenced as a result.
This is unamerican in the truest sense of the word, and should absolutely not be tolerated, much less touted as appropriate because one assumes the motiviation to be nothing more than banal greed.
These men want us cowering in fear.
... the very seven who were appointed by earlier, elected replublicans in years past. Cheap political quid-pro-quo in our nation's highest court, the constitution and fundamental democratic institutions of our nation be damned.
This of course is part of the authoritarians' reelection plan.
That would be election plan. These thugs were never elected in the first place, so they can hardly be reelected. They were appointed by seven of the nine supreme court justices
One of the worst things Al Q'aide did to America was lend an air of legitimacy to the usurpers currently running this nation's finances and reputation into the ground, and empowering the same right-wing criminals to seize unprecedented power as a result (and call the rest of us unpatriotic when we have the audacity to stand up and demand they stop trampling our constitutional rights).
But seriously, the issue is not, "Can good dining establishments be found in the UK?", or "How numerous are good British-born chefs?". Rather, the issue is, "How should one characterize the cuisine associated with the UK?", either traditionally, OR statistically vis-a-vis current practice. The traditional canard is, "To eat well in Britain, one must have breakfast three times daily."
:-)), but excellent in its own right nonetheless.
... citing them as definitive of that country's food is disingenuous at best.
Canards that are derived from cultural bigotry really shouldn't be touted as "traditional wisdom." Have you eaten "traditional english food" in Britain? How about "traditional American food" in America? (hint: much of the latter is in fact English cuisine, with the "English" label removed and replaced with "American").
I have, and though I only spent a few weeks there, it was sufficient to cause me to reverse the notion I once shared with you. Whether it was shepherds pie, or any number of other numerous dishes, English food is in fact quite excellent. Not as good as Itialian (but then, nothing is.
Now, most people can cite specific examples of fine *indigenous* cuisine traditionally associated with France, Italy, Spain, India, Thailand, Japan, selected regions of the USA, etc.
What is conviniently "forgotten", or rather, obfuscated by my countrymen (I am American), is that the vast majority of traditional "American" food is in fact English food. "As American as apple pie" is akin to saying "As American as the Queen": Apple pie was a part of English cuisine long before America was ever colonized. Ditto for Eggs and Bacon, steak, mashed potatoes and vegetables (fried or boiled), and so on.
We take a lot of credit for "inventing" a great many things we inherited from Britain when we broke away, including much of our cuisine.
But I doubt that the UK is exporting a taste for kidney pie, cornish pasties, bangers & mash, eel, or haggis.
And I doubt America is exporting much in the way of Rocky Mountain Oysters, and I truly wish we were exporting my grandfather's legendary hamburgers, rather than the cardboard McDonald's markets. Every culture has its emberrassing cuisines
Sorry, nothing personal, but after I discovered just how delicious traditional English food actually is, I was quite annoyed at the apparently concerted disinformation that has surrounded it over the years. I do not like being deceived, and I like seeing others propogate such misinformation even less.
Some guy on slashdot:
"...the lion's share doesn't mean the majority. The lion's share is 100%...everything." [ and offers a literary quote proving his hypothesis ]
Some other guy on slashdot quotes assorted "official" sources, each of which has copied the other's mistakes, akin to what reporters commonly do today. C.f. argumentum ad verecundiam (in particular, a quick perusal of various encylopedia and literary sources clearly indicates that the experts, including the dictionaries you cite, are not in universal agreement on this point, so quoting a subset of experts that happen to agree with your opinion, while ignorning the rest, is a logical fallacy).
Having done a little digging on my own (google can be your friend, but a dictionary can be even better) it appears that "some guy on slashdot" got it right, while the various dictionaries you quote in fact copied not only each other's mistakes, but the mistakes as they have propogated into common parlence. As to the 'chicken-or-egg' question of whether the misuse first began among the semi-literate masses, or was spoon-fed to them by the semi-literate media and/or erroneous reference compendia, can only be left to speculation.
I don't think your experiences are uncommon, Americans are used to and expect that kind of treatment. The perception from American customers is basically "I don't care how nice you are to me, as long as the food doesn't suck." There is a level of service expected, but its below what I've experienced in foreign countries.
... not in a thousand years.) My girlfriend and I actively avoid buying things at these stores. We go out of our way (and pay a little extra) to shop at our local neighborhood pharmacy, despite its lower selection, and we use Peapod to have our groceries delivered (initially to avoid dealing with the dehumanizing experience of being treated as vermin by a minimum-wage earning illiterate jackass at Jewel, now for the convinience of never facing lines at a checkout).
Or he may have visited large American cities.
I live and work in Chicago, and as an American who expects exactly what you describe (a bit of surliness at the diner if the waitress has had a long day, or a casual 'here you go' when someone brings out one's food in a more casual restaraunt) I can tell you that the staff at most of the stores (Jewel, Osco, Wallgreens, etc.) is absolutely appalling. Rudeness to redefine the term. You are a bug in their dirty ointment, a smear on their windshield as they assault their way through their workday, a worm to be despised.
In short, they feel (from their point of view, they "know") they are entitled to their job, they are entitled to their pay, and your presence as a paying customer needing service is an irritant they shouldn't have to endure simply to get the paycheck which is their God Given Right(tm). Spoiled, arrogant, entitlement children (many of adult age).
Buying groceries, you will be lucky if any words are spoken to you beyond "Ninety five thirty one." ("...is your total" is optional and generaly left off. As for "please", "thank you", or even a gruff "hello"
Smaller cities and towns have less of this in my experience, but in downtown Chicago civilized service, much less polite service, is virtually unheard of outside of the high-end department stores. (Restaurants are the exception, as they are working for tips. But go to a McDonalds or Wendy's and you'll discover just how quickly you become a worm once again.) What is even more appalling than the fact that these people do not get fired for this behavior (indeed, some of them, based upon their skills, should be unemployable without serious remedial training, and perhaps shock therapy), is that so many people are quite willing to give the businesses their money anyway.
As for why you'd need a license for this, it may the case that MS has a number of pending patents on the concept (orginally termed Caller ID) and the license mentioned prior is meant to assure people that if this makes it out there as a standard, they will have a license to practice with having to pay royalties.
... they certainly should not be given government monopoly entitlements to the concept, nor if our corrupt government does grant them such entitlements, should anyone respect it. Locate the infrastructure off shore instead.
Rather than give tacit support of software licenses to Microsoft (or anyone else), I'd rather just locate my DNS and mail server overseas, in a sane regime that doesn't recognize software patents, and use SPF irrespective of Microsofts intellectual property grab.
Microsoft obviously didn't invent anything here (the SPF folks did)
But unlike telcos, ISPs provide more than a wire. They provide services, such as email and DNS. Using your logic, I could see that an ISP, as a common carrier, would have to carry the spam, but as a service provider could then very well not deliver it. It's mildly similar to call-blocking features sold by the telcos. Sound reasonable?
It actually is simpler than that.
Define ISPs as common carriers (after all, in 99.999% of the cases that is effectively what they are, and any other course leads to a madhouse of government regulation and oversight).
Define SPAM to be illegal, just as SPAM faxes are illegal, and just as obscene and threatening phone calls are illegal.
Then, place enforcement where it belongs, with the authorities (who can require cooperation from ISPs), not the ISPs themselves, who should be in the business of providing connectivity and services, not enforcing the law.
Those services, as you correctly point out, would (and already do) logically include mail filtering software of varying quality.
If it reflects _anything_, it isn't black.
Of course it is. Every black object in the world reflects some light.
You are confusing black bodies, an abstract notion defined by physiscists which does not exist in the real, physical world, and the color black, which our eyes percieve just fine whether or not it is a shiny surface with a lot of reflection, or a matted surface with minimal (but still greater than zero) reflection. The black BMW I had the misfortune of following the other day positively glinted in the midday sun.
With light, black is defined as the abscence of color. With pigment, black is the presenece of all color (analogous to white light).
Not any longer. Post 9/11 the FAA redefined the airspace above FL600 as Class E, rather than Class G. A subtle but important difference
Of course, at the time this story was written, that wasn't the case...and once you're free of the earth's gravitational well, well, the FAA doesn't have a lot of wherewithall to enforce their authority anyway, nor ATC a great deal of interest in vectoring your flight.
(reference)
YAPPASELIAP ("yet another private pilot, ASEL, instrument aircraft pilot" [Beech owner])
Growing up, I approved of the Republicans- being a fiscal conservative and all.
... and while the Democrats could learn a little more restraint, they at least keep their spending within reasonable boundries, in stark constrast to the Republicans.
... equally as bad, were it not for the Republicans penchant for adding direct censorship in the name of "the children" on top of the more subtle but equally real censorship both parties favor in the name of copyright.
I too am fiscally conservative.
What is interesting, if one looks at the history of Repubican vs. Democratic spending over the last 80 years, one finds that the Democrats are actually far more fiscally responsible than the Republicans.
However, the Republicans have been far more successful at propogating the appearance of being fiscally responsible in the uninformed public's eye, largely as a result of their spending of trillions on defense and assorted industrial pork projects, while the Democrats spend mere billions on social programs and assorted industrial pork.
In other words, one party spends pennies on the dollar on the poor, while the other stuffs dollars on the dollar into the pockets of the wealthy, yet the party wasting record amounts of money (for the second time in three decades) and running up record deficits (again, for the second time in three decades) maintains the reputation for being fiscally responsible simply by brazenly preaching fiscal responsibility while refusing to follow their own advice.
It is strange indeed, the mentality of America in which giving pennies to the poor is seen as far more wasteful than handing dollars hand over fist to the rich.
The Republicans need to do more than become a lot more liberal on social issues. They need to learn how to budget
All that having been said, the Democrats are nearly as bad as the Republicans on the IP front
At what point then could we just download 'plans' off P2P and just 'grow' our own car, house, dinner....
... probably far away from the United States or Europe. If "harmonization" succeeds, there will be no such place, and the only products and creativity that will exist will be the glacially slow change industry offers us ... assuming they don't see any threat to their current revinue streams in offering the new product. There will be no innovation from outside, and with government mandated monopoly markets, no competition either.
At the point where the ruling oligarchs choose to relinquish their architectures of control (patent and copyright law) and allow knowledge and thought to be shared freely.
I.e. not in the lifetime of anyone currently living, if ever.
Expect nano-designs to be covered by both patents and copyrights, much like software in America is today. And expect progress to be decimated as a result, and the best products to be created in technical violation of the law in many places, such as mplayer is today (though fortunately not in violation of the laws where its author lives).
And the latter, semi-optomistic note, assumes there are safe havens where free thinking people can still create
So, the fact that brazilian law has written into it the notion of thought crimes means Microsoft's attempt to apply the definition of thought crime to its critics in a court of law an effort to declare their critics' spoken thoughts crimes doesn't represent Microsoft's stance on the issue?
Come on, spare us the Microsoft spin. Those who exploit and enforce unjust laws are no less unjust or evil themselves simply because the law itself exists and is on the books. Just ask anyone who spent the time as the wrong ethnicity at the wrong time in Iran, Iraq, Cambodia, Serbia, Spain, France, Germany, the United States, or several dozen other places.
The filing is in fact very revealing of Microsoft's mentality on the matter
This, irrespective of the truth of the assertions being made, that their ploy does indeed bear remarkable similiarity to the marketing methods of the drug cartels.
If I say that Microsoft's is akin to those of the Maifa, that there licensing schemes are more like the fifdom taxation scheme of Ole England, and that their very existence threatens innovation and the advancement of technology, would I get sued too? I guess I'd have to say those things in a public forum, and be in the position to influence thebuing decisions on thousands, if not millions of people. Kinda like /.
If you are in the United States you are safe (not from being sued, but from losing). Truth is an absolute defense, regardless of how damaging it may be. And every word you wrote is true.
Caveate: the truth used to set you free, pre-Bush/Chaney/Rumsfeld/Rice. These days, all bets are off, domestic or foreign.
Yes, but the thing is -- once you use GNU/Linux, you don't *want* to use other stuff -- but that's okay, because you can download all the GNU/Linux you want for free and will always be able to do so.
You are absolutely right, and here is the key difference between GNU and Microsoft:
With Microsoft, you have customer lock-in that actively discourages and often prevents a customer from chosing another system they would otherwise prefer. Evidence of this abounds in virtually every medium one might consider, from the opinion pages of Chicago newspapers to court filings in assorted lawsuits against Microsoft brought by companies and governments large and small, to the pages of the World Wide Web. Customer lock-in is real, destructive, and most importantly to a democratic government: non-democratic (ie choice is removed).
GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and other free software do not lock anyone in. Indeed, many free applications have been ported to Microsoft's inferior platform because people wanted to run the software and needed to keep running windows (quite probably due to customer lock-in).
The difference? With GNU/Linux you have the choice, even the choice to chose bondage to a large American corporate entity (read: run Windows). With Microsoft, you have no such choice: you are locked quite firmly in regardless of your other desires...with the only possible way out to dump Microsoft products completely.
The wisdom of such a choice is incontravertable, whether one is considering software quality, security, stability, or freedom, but that doesn't mean one has the ability to make such a choice, of one's data is already beholden to the behemoth. Even more so, now that Microsoft appears to be taking the $CO path more directly these days ("no customer, and especially no ex-customer, is safe").