Two issues were deliberately obfuscated by the Republicans in their constitutionally-dubious attempt to impeach Clinton:
1) Clinton, as you correctly point out, told the factual truth in court (he did not have sex with that woman, where sex is defined as intercourse).
2) Clinton most assuredly lied to the American people (who wouldn't when confronted with an illicit affair, and since when would it have been anyone's business anyway, but that is a rant for another day) when he told them on television he had not had sex with that woman, knowing full well that "sex" in the common parlence he was using to address the nation most certainly did include oral sex.
Clinton should never have been impeached. He most certainly did not break the law, and even if he had, its breakage would be on par with that of a speeding ticket, not a "high crime" for which a president should be impeached. And before someone cites "and misdemeanors" I should point out the absurdity of impeaching for a misdemeanor: we could get Dubya on jay walking, speeding, cocain use, and what not if we were to apply the same standards, and as much as I want the warmongering usurper out of office, impeachment on that basis would be highly inappropriate, and something I would personally raise my voice against.
Clinton lied. If that makes him unfit for office (and one can make a reasonable argument that it does), then clearly Dubya, his father, Reagan before him, Nixon and Ford before them, etc. ad nausuem are even more unfit for office, for they lie not just about their private affairs, they lie about public policy, creating fabrications to start wars that cost people lives and sap the military strength of the nation and, in the latest episode, burn up alliances and diminish our diplomatic strength as well.
That is not cut-paste scheme since you cannot cut and paste with it.
Really? I've been using X for over a decade and have never had any difficulty cutting and pasting with it. Perhaps you are dealing with user issues, and not design issues of the Window system or its applications.
I want to paste (and not cut)? Left-click/hold and select, point at the target and middle click.
I want to cut-and-paste? Left-click/hold and select, tap delete (or backspace), point at the target and middle click.
We need only one standard (by default, at least) and it seems that the market has chosen it
The 'market' hasn't chosen anything, any more than the market had chosen horse carriages over automobiles in 1920 simply because most people were still using the old technology.
Flames away, but I am still right.
Saying your right doesn't make it so, any more than Bush saying there are WMDs in Iraq make it so. Flames aren't required to rebut you: five seconds using X is sufficient.
Cut-and-Paste in X beats the competition...
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X.org and XFree86 Reform
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· Score: 4, Interesting
...hands down.
The problem is (or probably: was) not with X, but with Gnome and/or KDE
Indeed.
X has the most elegant cut-and-paste scheme I've ever seen, certainly vastly superior to Mac OS X and Windows.
Select with the left button pressed, and click with the middle button in the target window to paste. No Apple-C or control-V crap, no need to press any key of any kind. Click-select, click, and you're done.
Once you get used to it, you won't be able to stand the way Mac OS X and Windows handle cut-and-paste.
Gnome and KDE made the extremely boneheaded decision to mimic Windows even when it really doesn't make sense; when the X way of doing things is vastly better. Click to focus as a default? Ugh! Windows-style cut-and-paste? An affront to humankind.
I'm sure that lots of people think that the idea is possible. The real problem, though, is that SCO isn't telling anyone what the supposedly infringing code is, so that even if they are right, and even if we wanted to do the right thing and remove the infringing code, we can't.
Which, based upon 220+ years of copyright law in the United States, makes the Linux-using world liable for exactly $0.00 in damages.
Zero.
It's called having "dirty hands" and is fundamental to copyright law and enforcement, and regardless of the merits of SCO's case (which I think every informed reader agrees are negligable at best) that particular aspect of the law WILL NOT BE OVERTURNED or ignored.
Linux users have nothing to fear... unless the buy a SCO license (thereby violating the GPL). In which case a far graver risk than being sued for GPL violations (which could well happen) has been taken, namely establishing a contractual relationship with a company whose CEO has publicly stated that the sole purpose of Caldera/SCO contracts is to give SCO ammunition with which to sue its customers.
Only an absolute fool, with a corporate suicide bent, would enter into any kind of business relationship with the rabid, barrotrious company that Darl McBride has transformed Caldera into.
It doesn't take a college education or anything more than the old saw of "two wrongs don't make a right" to shoot down the obvious flaw in your reasoning.
Two wrongs can most certainly make a right.
If someone is attempting to kill you and your family (a wrong), you are certainly justified in killing them (a second wrong), resulting in the survival of you and your family (a right).
In this case, the recording companies have been screwing artists and engaging in anti-competative trade practices like the one outlined in this article (a plethora of wrongs). If file swappers can put the recording companies out of business by illegally downloading music (another wrong), then a new mechanism for artists to reach their fans will have to emerge. It is very unlikely such a mechanism will be any worse for the artist than what currently exists, and a strong liklihood it will in fact be much better (this would be a "right").
All of that having been said, I really wish people didn't trade files illegally. P2P technology is IMHO critical to the future of the internet in terms of scalability. The internet itself is fundamentally P2P in its design, and when it comes to downloading Linux ISOs, or legitimate, free media (home movies, machinima animations, popular slashdot stories) having a P2P infrastructure in place will be invaluable. Every illegal download puts amunition in the guns of those who would ban such technologies and change the Internet from a fundamentally P2P medium, where we are all equally empowered to server content as well as consume it, to a top down glorified shopping network/cable channel.
And that is a disservice to all of us who value our freedom of expression.
So, ironically, while I disagree with your reasoning, I share your desire for this illegal file trading to stop, so that the rest of us don't have our rights and ability to trade files legally crippled and perhaps one day even revoked altogether ("trusted computing," "palladiium", super-DMCA, SCO-Law, etc. ad nauseum).
I believe in Open Source, and I will not allow any government to keep me from using it and contributing to it.
Not much could turn me into a revolutionary, but something like this just might.
I am generally quite content, living a comfortable lifestyle in a reasonably comfortable country, with a decent paying job, my toys, a nice home in a nice city, a woman I love, and just about anything else contentment requires (including that one important prerequisite, a measure of freedom). Any anger or annoyance I feel toward the world is easilly vented here or elsewhere online and purged from my system, after which I continue on just as reasonably content as before.
However, banning free software could seriously make me reconsider that (scratch the job, and with it likely the home and the plane. Take away the freedom and no amount of toys or perks will bring contentment again). Whether I would become a true scorched-earth revolutionary I doubt, but I would certainly sell the condo and the airplane, emigrate from this country, renounce my citizenship, and use my talents to enrich a nation more deserving than the United State's will have become if our leaders even seriously consider doing something like this.
I can see a day - say after Al Quaida manages an actual attack via the Internet - when Dick Cheney's mob makes it illegal to sell American software to Foreigners.
Perhaps some forward looking companies are moving significant parts of their programming offshore just to avoid this possibility.
As in "American software? No this is INDIAN software, so the American export rules don't apply!".
I predicted something like this pre-DMCA, where American laws (like the DMCA) and American litigiousness would drive most of the software industry overseas. This was at least five years ago (and posted here on slashdot as well as USENET), and if I recall correctly I said something along the lines of "in five or ten years we will be decrying the loss of high-tech jobs to those overseas, bashing whatever up-and-coming country has usurped our technical lead, and wondering why all the money and jobs had left the US economy.
I didn't know it would be India (though I speculated India, China, or even Europe would be possibilities), and I didn't know it would happen via outsourcing, but I am unsurprised at the result.
And yes, I do think the actions of monopolists such as Microsoft and their litigious hired thugs, such as SCO, will drive the remnants of US software innovation overseas, just as the DMCA has already done to some degree (DVD player software and video encoding technologies developed in Europe) and just as the idiotic encryption policies did (gnupg and others are still developed overseas).
It is a very short step from being an "outsourcing" company for HP to becoming a foreign competitor of HP (perhaps using insider info garnered through previous outsourcing, but more likely simply exploiting the natural expertise gained from doing someone elses work for them and learning to do it better and cheaper than they can).
This is the decline of the American technology sector, and it is almost a picture perfect imitation of what happened to the American automobile industry. Instead of Shoddy Ford Pintos blowing up we have Shoddy Microsoft Windows contracting every bug and virus under the sun, and instead of Detroit protectionism we have the likes of SCO and Microsoft creating a ripe environment for a competitor.
That competitor is Free Software, and banning it in America will not make it go away at all. It will simply mean that America has no competative product, while every other nation on the planet does. Sianara American preeminence in software engineering.
Otherwise, lying to Congress is illegal. If you received sexual favors and lied to Congress about it, then it's like double-secret illegal.
It's far simpler than that.
If you are a Republican and you lie to a Democratic congress, you are breaking the law (c.f "Iran-Contra").
If you are a Democrat and you lie to a Republican congress, you are breaking the law (c.f. "I did not have sex with that woman").
If you are a Republican and you lie to a Republican congress, you get a standing ovation (c.f. the "State of the Union" address 2002, 2003, 2004).
If you are a Democrat and you lie to a Democratic congress, you may or may not get a standing ovation, but you certainly won't get into trouble.
You will note that this is orthogonal to what precisely it is you are lying about. Arms supplied to Pro-US Central American terrorists in order to arm and pay off Anti-US Middle-Eastern Terrorists got Reagan into trouble with a Democratic congress, but lying about weapon's of mass destruction as a pretense to launching a preemptive war, contravening two centuries of US policy and philosophy, was of no concern to a Republican congress (while Clinton's picadellies in the Oval Office earned him an impeachment).
Do you folks even know what VAPORware is?
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2003 Vaporware Awards
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· Score: 3, Informative
Maybe you cannot be nominated more then 10 times in a row or so?
Or the fact that you can download it might disqualify it from being "vapor"-ware, at least to anyone who understands what the term means. Or are the usual anti-GNU shills more unaware than usual of common dictionary definitions of the terms they bandy about?
And when it comes to consistency... a single instrument can make the most monumentally consistent error... it helps to have other instruments and methods to compare against here...
Yes, but having half a map done one way and half a map done the other gives you the worst of both: systemic errors AND inconsistencies between the two (making "big picture" observations and theories derived therefrom troublesome at best).
Far better to map the thing TWICE, with two different instruments, and use the two maps as a crosscheck against each other. CONSISTENCY and a corrective factor for systemic errors inherent to either instrument alone.
... there is an idiot stupid enough to eat cochroaches. Or automobile tires. Or used condoms.
These people exist. Usually nature is somewhat effective in removing them from the evolutionary process, if the species is lucky enought to have them engage in their favorite passtime prior to producing progeny.
In any event, whether or not the species is fortunate enough to have such fools removed from the gene pool prior to procreation, one thing is certain. No one is stupid enough to propose the FDA regulate cockroaches, automobile tires, or used condoms.
But apparently some anti-genetic science luddites are stupid enough to think the FDA should regulate the genetically modified equivelent of gold fish. Alas, such idiots are not so accomidating as to remove themselves from our collective gene pool, more's the pity.
So, when every Window is a computer monitor / tv / sterio capable of displaying the latest high-resolution mars photos and OSX/KDE/gnome desktop (or Windows desktop for those less advantaged), who retains the trademark on Windows(tm).
Microsoft, or Anderson?:-)
Or do we all now have to start calling our windows "glass enclosures" on pain of lawsuit?
A lot of people say they hate Microsoft because they say its on a mission of world domination.
Linus has been talking about world domination for 10 years.
[...]
So when its microsoft, people get antsy, but when its linux or debian, world domination is ok ?
Is that because 1) linux+debian are "inherently" good, and microsoft is inherently bad? 2) people are hypocritical and don't think more than about 8 inches infront of them 3) some other reason im missing..
1 and 3 are the correct answers.
3: Humor is a difficult concept I know, but try to follow along. Linus has been talking about "world domination" as a joke, not as a serious agenda. Any reading of his comments, in context, should make this abundantly clear (as should the historical context in which those of us using Linux in the early days circa 1993 never expected it to have the success it has had today).
which leads us to
1: Microsoft really is about world domination, and has a tremendously long track record of anti-competative behavior as a convicted monopolist to drive that point home. Microsoft really is about denying people choice, and has every intention of eradicating any viable alternative to their monopoly. Linux (even an arrogant distribution like Debian) has always been about choice, and Debian's occasional arrogance aside, this script's description as a "world domination utility" is almost certainly tongue in cheeck (c.f. "humor") and not meant seriously. In other words, yes, Microsoft (as defined by their own behavior) is Evil, and Linux (as defined by the behavior of its community) is generally Good.
And I say that as one who uses Gentoo and will never go back to Debian (ie. one who should "feel offended" if in fact I took this seriously, which I do not). It is a clever tool with a funny name based on an old, old joke, made all the funnier for having become a possibility (GNU/Linux really could "dominate" the world... in the sense of becoming really populiar... who would have thunk? Of course, GNU/Linux will never truly dominate anything, as dominion implies restriction of the freedom and choice of others, which is something a free, GPLed operating system can never do, by design.)
If MS released the "Linux Upgrade Kit" that put whatever SKU of windows you wanted on the box, people would be furious.
They have (or haven't you been following their press releases), and while people are annoyed, no one seems to be particularly "furious." The reaction is more one of "rolling our eyes." A migration kit from Linux to Windows will get about as much use as a football bat...but it is fun to watch the behomeoth flounder and flail around.
I think.com should have this rule put into effect (like on so many other registries), then have some major cleaning up done and those who didn't have a registered name (i.e. free-viagra-now.com) be moved to the.info registry.
While I agree that such a rule would have been nice from day one, it does have its problems.
1) trademarks are not unique
a) they are limited by "domain" (e.g. Macintosh(tm) for apples can exist in parallel with Macintosh(tm) for computers)
b) they are limited by geography (e.g. in the US, I can own "SourceMagic"(tm) in Illinois, while in Wisconsin someone else may have the same trademark for the same "domain", and national trademarks for x in Germany can be owned by one company, and a completely different company may have the same exact trademark registered in Canada or the United States).
This works for national domains, such as co.uk, where (a) there aren't state or local trademarks, only national trademarks (or they only allow national trademarks to use the domain), but it won't work for most trademarks in an international domain such as.com regardless.
Now, if one wanted to make a.tm domain, e.g. uk.tm, us.tm, etc. then it would work pretty well, but that assumes (a).tm isn't already a TLD for some country (I haven't checked), (b) each country administers its.tm according to its own trademark laws, and (c) it won't matter unless we can get the f*cking lawyers out of the other domains and into the.tm domain where they belong (good luck getting parasites out of anything).
I think it's interesting that initially the Americans tried to point the finger of possibility at just about anything capable of leaking built by the Russians, who of course have a zillion more years of experience building these things than we do...
References?
I recall both sides saying they had no idea where the problem was and that they were looking for it. I don't recall anyone placing any blame ahead of time, except perhaps for some slashdot trolls.
To get your German license, you will need official proof-of-address (Anmeldbecheinigung) and your passport. No fingerprints, but they have a good lock on who you are and where you live.
Exactly. When I first lived in Germany (1987) and had to get an Anmeldbescheinigung I was shocked. The idea of having to check in with the local constablary every time I moved (I worked a summer job in one city outside of Cologne, and went to school in Darmstadt, so I had to do this twice) of course invited me to compare that with my relative anonymouty in the United States. (Registering my boom box and paying a radio tax struck me as big brotherish and weird, too. Actually, that still strikes me as an unfortunate approach to funding of the public broadcasters, but compared to what is done by industry to our private sphere in the US, it is nevertheless quite benign).
Flash forward seventeen years (2004): I've been fingerprinted five (5) times (!!!) for my job: twice at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, twice at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, and once at the Chicago Board of Trade. Then there was that interesting opportunity in grade school, when a local law enforcement officer came and taught us a little about the police and the FBI, then offered to let anyone who wanted to be fingerprinted. At 10 years of age (IIRC) none of us were too aware of the privacy implications... we just thought it was cool that we got to be fingerprinted.
By my second stay in Germany (working a summer job in Leverkusen) I'd come to appreciate the greater degree of freedom and privacy afforded my in Germany vs. that of the United States. No selling my phone number to telemarketers, no fingerprinting, nothing obvious or Big Brotherish as we've come to expect in the states.
Most Americans, upon finding to their surprise that they are more free in many places abroad than they are in their own land, find it to be truly ironic. I merely find it sand, to have seen a country slip so far toward authoritarianism in so short a time. Alas, I haven't worked in Germany since the mid-nineteen nineties, so emigration there is nigh unto impossible.
If it was so obvious, why didn't you or any other person patent it first?
Maybe it was so obvious he did come up with it first. And likely realized it was so obvious it wasn't patentable, and so didn't even start the footrace to the patent office, much less win it. Or maybe he did try to patent the idea despite its obviousness, and despite having invented the idea first, lost the footrace to the patent office because his postal worker took a coffee break and the patent application didn't get shipped across the country in that day's mail.
In this day and age, when dozens of people independently "invent" the same thing more or less at the same time simply because it is an idea whose "time has come" (the pieces and infrastructure that make the realization of that idea are in place for the first time), it is the corporation with the fastest lawyers who wins the footrace to the patent office, denying any other inventors of the same technology the right to use their own inventions, much less anyone else from building upon them.
The number of patents for non-obvious methods are vastly outweighed by the number of obviouse, trivial, unenforcable patents that are issued and that remain profitable because challenging them in court is just too damn expensive, and there are just too many tens of thousands of the fucking things (enough to bankrupt the entire GDP in litigation costs if they were all to be challenged).
The result? Our free market of competition of free no more: it has been reduced to a planned economy of entitlement monopolies, and the stock market little more than a glorified futures market on said monopolies (at least in the medical and technical arenas).
cue Microsoft provocateurs, *BSD License zealots, and SCO apologists...
I can smell the flamage of the battle to come from here.
You are right. The anti-qt FUD is just that, FUD, and no less so for being propogated by zealots that were once representative of a more mainstream ("gentler, kinder, more corporate, less political") version of free software renamed open source (and who have replaced the politics of freedom with the politics of gratis beer, of subjective preferences vis-a-vis Gnome v. KDE, gtk v. qt, and Open Source non-GPL with GPL where it make sense to unerscore their position on gtk v. qt, while maintaining a hypocritically and diametrically opposed opinion on the very same license for the other 90% of the software that makes up the system they are trying to promote).
QT is GPLed, just as is the Linux kernel, gcc, and most of GNU. Any statement claiming qt is closed or proprietary is FUD and likely a troll (whether it is a Microsoft financed troll or not is an interesting debate for another time), as it is equivelent to saying that the GPL is closed or propriatery, a nonsensical stance taken by *BSD Licensing zealots, Microsofties, and others who would prefer to take the hard work of others and not give back in return, and resent not being allowed to do so.
I have no preference for qt vs. gtk, and I find both the GPL and BSD-style licenses to be useful in the appropriate place, but as you point out, only an idiot (syn. "troll"), a FUD-mongering zealot with an axe to grind, or an agent provocatuer from the anti-free software crowd (Microsoft et al) would seriously argue that a GPLed library is "closed."
Enough people here take the free market as a religion, the sole and primary characteristic of anything good, that I'd expect people to keep that in mind. They usually do in the business world. But ohhhh no, as soon as foreign countries - especially those "subhuman" ones lumped under the title of "Third World," as though Nicaragua, Brazil, Afghanistan and India all belong to a single, undifferentiated bloc of squalor - then they must be foulest evil fit only to be destroyed if they approach our sacrosanct grandeur.
So what the hell is it with that? Is America's hegemony so shaky that you can't stand the thought of another major country getting its technology base built up without wetting yourselves in abject terror?
Point of Order.
It isn't the American Hegemony that is shakey (though, perhaps it is), it is the poster's own faith in his/her own culture that is very shakey.
Understandable. With people like GW Bush running the country my faith in the long term prosperity, much less the survival, of the USA is pretty damn shakey.
Free Markets are great for some things (like trinkets, PCs, furniture, houses) and lousy for others (Nursing Homes, Healthcare, Roads and Highways).
As for the third worlds emergence as equal, capable competitors and partners in trade and science, I, as an American, am delighted for several reasons, including
The need for checks and balances (absolute power corrupts, and America has too much of both already. We need a check and balance on our power, for both our own good and that of the world).
Greater wealth for all (the more people with wealth to spend, the more opportunity there is for all of us. The worst economic situation is where 1% of the people control 98% of the wealth, as most of the wealth and economy becomes inaccessible to the vast majority, in terms of spending power and opportunity. Oops, that pretty much describes what we've allowed the US to become, which does in fact underscore your very good point about our getting our own house in order).
World Peace. Okay, that may not be all that likely, but as Europe, North America, and the Pacific Rim have shown, the more prosperity there is, and the more interdepence between cultures there is to maintain that prosperity, the greater the probability of peace and the lower the probability of war. No guarantee, as Yugoslavia demonstrated in the 1990s, but certainly it helps
Well, from what I gathered from the article and from my own understanding it sounds to me like he gets it. The spammers don't live in VA and did not purposely avail themselves of doing business in VA, so they didn't meet the threshold for establishing personal jurisdiction, at least according to the judge. Maybe if he had specific knowledge that the crap he was sending out was headed for Virginia it might be different.
They guy sent millions of SPAM to people all over the world. He couldn't reasonably expect not to be sending some SPAM to virginia, where in fact it is banned. Furthermore, it is his responsibility to know where he is conducting his business (the servers are located in VA, that is trivial to find out, and it was the SPAMmers responsibility as a businessman to ascertain that).
It is really quite stunning that ignorance has been held up by a federal judge as a legitimate defense, particularly in a case where ignorance of ones own bsuiness is (a) almost certainly feigned and (b) if true, a sign of negligence, not innocence.
Either way, the fact remains that the SPAMmer sent SPAM to VA residents in violation of VA law, and said SPAM originated from servers located in VA. If that isn't enough to determine that the jurisdiction is in fact in VA, then no law regarding the Internet, anywhere, is enforcable. While the libertarians might relish this thought, I don't think such a position is going to be tenable for very long. I would be surprised if AOL didn't win on appeal.
The law already covers this inherently. THe driver that causes the accident gets a ticket. Why is this law even needed?
Because they would like to empower the police to put a stop to dangerous behavior before it causes an accident. The prior law you cite only accounted for assigning blame after an accident had already occurred...it did little if anything to prevent accidents ahead of time, or to allow the police to do so if they observed someone behaving dangerously (like half the cell phone users on the road).
Now, this particular form of negligent driving (fiddling with a laptop while driving) is punishable, without the need for twisted metal and carnage first. I too agree that it is overly broad: a passenger navigating should be able to use GPSdrive (more effecient and really no different than using a map), and anyone should be able to use a cell phone provided they are using a handsfree set with voice-tagged numbers. However, fiddling with the thing and looking up names/numbers on the phone while driving is rightly prohibited.
The real issue is that the law hasn't looked at the technology close enough, or drawn the line finely enough, between legitimate, enabling technology (e.g. getting directions on a handsfree phone while driving, or having a navigating passenger use a computer to avoid getting lost) and stupid, moronic, negligent use of technology (browsing the web while driving, watching tv whilee driving, manually tuning the radio while driving, fiddling with one's cell phone while driving, or driving one handed while holding the cell phone up to one's ear). One can reasonably expect future revisions of the law to refine this, particularly as virtually every automobile gets sophisticated computer equipment and "glass cockpit" style displays installed in future models.
I installed OO.o for OS X the other day, and poked around a bit. Gotta admit, it isn't anywhere near as easy to use outa the box as either Office or AppleWorks, at least for me (got both installed).
You really should try running it under GNU/Linux instead (either intel Linux via VirtualPC, or PPC linux on another partition) if you'd like to see the current state of the art as far as Open Office is concerned.
As I found out, to my dismay when I tried to get my girlfriend up and running on Open Office with her Powerbook 17", Open Office for Mac is kludgy (runs under X11, not aqua), out of date (v. 1.0.3 vs. 1.1 in the Linux and Windoze world), and buggy (font issues, and it won't print to her HP all-in-one printer no matter how many sheep we burn in offering^H^H^H^H^H what workarounds are tried, and yes, I have exhausted all of the suggestions in the Apple fora as well as google searches too numerous to count).
I ended up (reluctantly) suggesting she stick with Microsoft Office for Mac for the time being, and we can revisit Open Office if and when it ever gets decent Mac support. It works fine for her, and she is happy again. Very happy, actually, as she is no longer running windows (read: her laptop doesn't crash like her old Dell Inspiron with Windows/ME did) and she can get the work done she needs to. Becoming entirely Microsoft free is something she'd like to do, but Open Office simply isn't ready on her platform.
In the interim I continue to run Open Office exclusively, under Linux via PowerPC on my Powerbook, and under Linux on my intel computers, exporting to MS format when I need to send her something she can edit.
That said, I think it has a lot of potential, and I'm anxious to see what the Aqua-native version will bring. And the folks over at OO.o admit that it's not for the faint-of-heart, and recommend it only for geek-y types at this time.
Indeed it does, and on platforms it does support natively it is very good. I too can't wait for an aqua version (1.1 hopefully), and I think Apple made a big mistake in not putting some muscle into getting a native release sooner. There are plenty of people switching to Apple out of loathing for Microsoft, my GF included, and telling them they'll still be buying and running MS Office is a surefire way to squandor an opportunity to wean people away from their competitor completely.
Al Gore made an honest claim about something that he was justly proud of. And somebody deliberately misquoted him to make it appear that he was claiming to have "invented the internet".
That "someone" who deliberately misrepresented what Al Gore said (and whose misrepresentation was then repeated by other, lazy journalists ad nauseum) would be Declan McCullagh of WiReD magazine, whose yellow journalism redefines the color yellow, and who enjoys enough of a rapport with slashdot editors to have his byline placed on any story of his slashdot links to (unlike, say, this story here, and just about every other story linked to).
He single handedly drew attention to the LiViD (Linux DVD) project by publishing a hysterical article about DVD pirates writing software (before it was even working, and knowing full well that the project wasn't about copying DVDs, it was about playing them on Linux, something one couldn't do back then. He subscribed to the mailing list, he knew exactly what he was doing.)
His career is littered with the destroyed public image of more people and projects than I can reasonably count, and his deliberate, premeditated sabataging of Al Gore by deliberately misquoting and misrepresenting him places him at the lowest level of journalism... right down there with Fox News and the National Equirer.
Is the desire to feed one's children unethical? Particularly given that jobs are not exactly thick on the ground at the moment...
The willingness to do something unethical to feed your children is most assuredly unethical. To lend aid, support, and help to those doing something unethical, which detrimentally affects the ability of others to feed their children, is harmful and, yes, unethical.
"Wanting to feed your children" with no further datapoints is neither ethical nor unethical. Feed them what? Soup from the local soup kitchen? Cereal from the store (bought with your $CO-written paycheck for helping defame thousands of innocents and affect their ability to make a living)? Your neighbor's dog? Your neighbor?
Being willing to destroy the livelyhood of thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of others through deceit and deception, to defraud your investors through public misinformation, in order to feed your little brats is very, very unethical. Exactly as unethical if your motive were to buy crack cocain, or a hooker.
In this case it is how some people (SCO employees) have chosen to earn their money that is unethical, and that has absolutely nothing to do with how they intend to spend their ill-gotten gains.
We're not talking about a company that makes its living selling crack in schoolyards and beating up people's grandmothers.
Most people understand that in common parlance "blood money" is often used to refer to ill-gotten gains, and does not require physical assault to apply. We are dealing with a company that has publicly stated its intention to deny thousands of volunteer software developers the right to use the products of their own work, to defraud fifteen hundred "licensees" (at least) of $699.00 (or $1399.00, at least) for each Linux box they run for a license that clearly states (in the very license itself) that it offers them nothing (and clearly places them in violation of the license under which they can redistribute Linux, i.e. does place anyone purchasing it and then distributing Linux in a position of being guilty of copyright violation), wish to deny millions access to inexpensive and powerful software legally written and given away through a PR campaign of deceipt and deception, and is clearly and obvously defrauding their investors of a tidy sum each day their stock trades. Such gains are most assuredly ill-gotten, and refering to such as "blood money" well within the common usage of the phrase even if it does run afoul of your simplistic, literal thinking.
If everyone quit the instant that the company did something that didn't line up exactly with their idea of a correct decision, nobody would have a work experience with more than 3 months at a stretch.
Disagreeing with policy is one thing. Supporting a company and continuing to work for it when it is engaged in the kinds of activities outlined above is something else.
It is time you got a grip, and stopped justifying unconscionable behavior merely because doing the right thing happens to be difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
...not to the court, but to the public.
Two issues were deliberately obfuscated by the Republicans in their constitutionally-dubious attempt to impeach Clinton:
1) Clinton, as you correctly point out, told the factual truth in court (he did not have sex with that woman, where sex is defined as intercourse).
2) Clinton most assuredly lied to the American people (who wouldn't when confronted with an illicit affair, and since when would it have been anyone's business anyway, but that is a rant for another day) when he told them on television he had not had sex with that woman, knowing full well that "sex" in the common parlence he was using to address the nation most certainly did include oral sex.
Clinton should never have been impeached. He most certainly did not break the law, and even if he had, its breakage would be on par with that of a speeding ticket, not a "high crime" for which a president should be impeached. And before someone cites "and misdemeanors" I should point out the absurdity of impeaching for a misdemeanor: we could get Dubya on jay walking, speeding, cocain use, and what not if we were to apply the same standards, and as much as I want the warmongering usurper out of office, impeachment on that basis would be highly inappropriate, and something I would personally raise my voice against.
Clinton lied. If that makes him unfit for office (and one can make a reasonable argument that it does), then clearly Dubya, his father, Reagan before him, Nixon and Ford before them, etc. ad nausuem are even more unfit for office, for they lie not just about their private affairs, they lie about public policy, creating fabrications to start wars that cost people lives and sap the military strength of the nation and, in the latest episode, burn up alliances and diminish our diplomatic strength as well.
WROGN!
That is not cut-paste scheme since you cannot cut and paste with it.
Really? I've been using X for over a decade and have never had any difficulty cutting and pasting with it. Perhaps you are dealing with user issues, and not design issues of the Window system or its applications.
I want to paste (and not cut)? Left-click/hold and select, point at the target and middle click.
I want to cut-and-paste? Left-click/hold and select, tap delete (or backspace), point at the target and middle click.
We need only one standard (by default, at least) and it seems that the market has chosen it
The 'market' hasn't chosen anything, any more than the market had chosen horse carriages over automobiles in 1920 simply because most people were still using the old technology.
Flames away, but I am still right.
Saying your right doesn't make it so, any more than Bush saying there are WMDs in Iraq make it so. Flames aren't required to rebut you: five seconds using X is sufficient.
...hands down.
The problem is (or probably: was) not with X, but with Gnome and/or KDE
Indeed.
X has the most elegant cut-and-paste scheme I've ever seen, certainly vastly superior to Mac OS X and Windows.
Select with the left button pressed, and click with the middle button in the target window to paste. No Apple-C or control-V crap, no need to press any key of any kind. Click-select, click, and you're done.
Once you get used to it, you won't be able to stand the way Mac OS X and Windows handle cut-and-paste.
Gnome and KDE made the extremely boneheaded decision to mimic Windows even when it really doesn't make sense; when the X way of doing things is vastly better. Click to focus as a default? Ugh! Windows-style cut-and-paste? An affront to humankind.
I'm sure that lots of people think that the idea is possible. The real problem, though, is that SCO isn't telling anyone what the supposedly infringing code is, so that even if they are right, and even if we wanted to do the right thing and remove the infringing code, we can't.
... unless the buy a SCO license (thereby violating the GPL). In which case a far graver risk than being sued for GPL violations (which could well happen) has been taken, namely establishing a contractual relationship with a company whose CEO has publicly stated that the sole purpose of Caldera/SCO contracts is to give SCO ammunition with which to sue its customers.
Which, based upon 220+ years of copyright law in the United States, makes the Linux-using world liable for exactly $0.00 in damages.
Zero.
It's called having "dirty hands" and is fundamental to copyright law and enforcement, and regardless of the merits of SCO's case (which I think every informed reader agrees are negligable at best) that particular aspect of the law WILL NOT BE OVERTURNED or ignored.
Linux users have nothing to fear
Only an absolute fool, with a corporate suicide bent, would enter into any kind of business relationship with the rabid, barrotrious company that Darl McBride has transformed Caldera into.
It doesn't take a college education or anything more than the old saw of "two wrongs don't make a right" to shoot down the obvious flaw in your reasoning.
Two wrongs can most certainly make a right.
If someone is attempting to kill you and your family (a wrong), you are certainly justified in killing them (a second wrong), resulting in the survival of you and your family (a right).
In this case, the recording companies have been screwing artists and engaging in anti-competative trade practices like the one outlined in this article (a plethora of wrongs). If file swappers can put the recording companies out of business by illegally downloading music (another wrong), then a new mechanism for artists to reach their fans will have to emerge. It is very unlikely such a mechanism will be any worse for the artist than what currently exists, and a strong liklihood it will in fact be much better (this would be a "right").
All of that having been said, I really wish people didn't trade files illegally. P2P technology is IMHO critical to the future of the internet in terms of scalability. The internet itself is fundamentally P2P in its design, and when it comes to downloading Linux ISOs, or legitimate, free media (home movies, machinima animations, popular slashdot stories) having a P2P infrastructure in place will be invaluable. Every illegal download puts amunition in the guns of those who would ban such technologies and change the Internet from a fundamentally P2P medium, where we are all equally empowered to server content as well as consume it, to a top down glorified shopping network/cable channel.
And that is a disservice to all of us who value our freedom of expression.
So, ironically, while I disagree with your reasoning, I share your desire for this illegal file trading to stop, so that the rest of us don't have our rights and ability to trade files legally crippled and perhaps one day even revoked altogether ("trusted computing," "palladiium", super-DMCA, SCO-Law, etc. ad nauseum).
I believe in Open Source, and I will not allow any government to keep me from using it and contributing to it.
Not much could turn me into a revolutionary, but something like this just might.
I am generally quite content, living a comfortable lifestyle in a reasonably comfortable country, with a decent paying job, my toys, a nice home in a nice city, a woman I love, and just about anything else contentment requires (including that one important prerequisite, a measure of freedom). Any anger or annoyance I feel toward the world is easilly vented here or elsewhere online and purged from my system, after which I continue on just as reasonably content as before.
However, banning free software could seriously make me reconsider that (scratch the job, and with it likely the home and the plane. Take away the freedom and no amount of toys or perks will bring contentment again). Whether I would become a true scorched-earth revolutionary I doubt, but I would certainly sell the condo and the airplane, emigrate from this country, renounce my citizenship, and use my talents to enrich a nation more deserving than the United State's will have become if our leaders even seriously consider doing something like this.
And I mean it.
I can see a day - say after Al Quaida manages an actual attack via the Internet - when Dick Cheney's mob makes it illegal to sell American software to Foreigners.
Perhaps some forward looking companies are moving significant parts of their programming offshore just to avoid this possibility.
As in "American software? No this is INDIAN software, so the American export rules don't apply!".
I predicted something like this pre-DMCA, where American laws (like the DMCA) and American litigiousness would drive most of the software industry overseas. This was at least five years ago (and posted here on slashdot as well as USENET), and if I recall correctly I said something along the lines of "in five or ten years we will be decrying the loss of high-tech jobs to those overseas, bashing whatever up-and-coming country has usurped our technical lead, and wondering why all the money and jobs had left the US economy.
I didn't know it would be India (though I speculated India, China, or even Europe would be possibilities), and I didn't know it would happen via outsourcing, but I am unsurprised at the result.
And yes, I do think the actions of monopolists such as Microsoft and their litigious hired thugs, such as SCO, will drive the remnants of US software innovation overseas, just as the DMCA has already done to some degree (DVD player software and video encoding technologies developed in Europe) and just as the idiotic encryption policies did (gnupg and others are still developed overseas).
It is a very short step from being an "outsourcing" company for HP to becoming a foreign competitor of HP (perhaps using insider info garnered through previous outsourcing, but more likely simply exploiting the natural expertise gained from doing someone elses work for them and learning to do it better and cheaper than they can).
This is the decline of the American technology sector, and it is almost a picture perfect imitation of what happened to the American automobile industry. Instead of Shoddy Ford Pintos blowing up we have Shoddy Microsoft Windows contracting every bug and virus under the sun, and instead of Detroit protectionism we have the likes of SCO and Microsoft creating a ripe environment for a competitor.
That competitor is Free Software, and banning it in America will not make it go away at all. It will simply mean that America has no competative product, while every other nation on the planet does. Sianara American preeminence in software engineering.
Otherwise, lying to Congress is illegal. If you received sexual favors and lied to Congress about it, then it's like double-secret illegal.
It's far simpler than that.
If you are a Republican and you lie to a Democratic congress, you are breaking the law (c.f "Iran-Contra").
If you are a Democrat and you lie to a Republican congress, you are breaking the law (c.f. "I did not have sex with that woman").
If you are a Republican and you lie to a Republican congress, you get a standing ovation (c.f. the "State of the Union" address 2002, 2003, 2004).
If you are a Democrat and you lie to a Democratic congress, you may or may not get a standing ovation, but you certainly won't get into trouble.
You will note that this is orthogonal to what precisely it is you are lying about. Arms supplied to Pro-US Central American terrorists in order to arm and pay off Anti-US Middle-Eastern Terrorists got Reagan into trouble with a Democratic congress, but lying about weapon's of mass destruction as a pretense to launching a preemptive war, contravening two centuries of US policy and philosophy, was of no concern to a Republican congress (while Clinton's picadellies in the Oval Office earned him an impeachment).
Maybe you cannot be nominated more then 10 times in a row or so?
Or the fact that you can download it might disqualify it from being "vapor"-ware, at least to anyone who understands what the term means. Or are the usual anti-GNU shills more unaware than usual of common dictionary definitions of the terms they bandy about?
And when it comes to consistency... a single instrument can make the most monumentally consistent error... it helps to have other instruments and methods to compare against here...
Yes, but having half a map done one way and half a map done the other gives you the worst of both: systemic errors AND inconsistencies between the two (making "big picture" observations and theories derived therefrom troublesome at best).
Far better to map the thing TWICE, with two different instruments, and use the two maps as a crosscheck against each other. CONSISTENCY and a corrective factor for systemic errors inherent to either instrument alone.
... there is an idiot stupid enough to eat cochroaches. Or automobile tires. Or used condoms.
These people exist. Usually nature is somewhat effective in removing them from the evolutionary process, if the species is lucky enought to have them engage in their favorite passtime prior to producing progeny.
In any event, whether or not the species is fortunate enough to have such fools removed from the gene pool prior to procreation, one thing is certain. No one is stupid enough to propose the FDA regulate cockroaches, automobile tires, or used condoms.
But apparently some anti-genetic science luddites are stupid enough to think the FDA should regulate the genetically modified equivelent of gold fish. Alas, such idiots are not so accomidating as to remove themselves from our collective gene pool, more's the pity.
So, when every Window is a computer monitor / tv / sterio capable of displaying the latest high-resolution mars photos and OSX/KDE/gnome desktop (or Windows desktop for those less advantaged), who retains the trademark on Windows(tm).
:-)
Microsoft, or Anderson?
Or do we all now have to start calling our windows "glass enclosures" on pain of lawsuit?
A lot of people say they hate Microsoft because they say its on a mission of world domination.
... in the sense of becoming really populiar ... who would have thunk? Of course, GNU/Linux will never truly dominate anything, as dominion implies restriction of the freedom and choice of others, which is something a free, GPLed operating system can never do, by design.)
Linus has been talking about world domination for 10 years.
[...]
So when its microsoft, people get antsy, but when its linux or debian, world domination is ok ?
Is that because
1) linux+debian are "inherently" good, and microsoft is inherently bad?
2) people are hypocritical and don't think more than about 8 inches infront of them
3) some other reason im missing..
1 and 3 are the correct answers.
3: Humor is a difficult concept I know, but try to follow along. Linus has been talking about "world domination" as a joke, not as a serious agenda. Any reading of his comments, in context, should make this abundantly clear (as should the historical context in which those of us using Linux in the early days circa 1993 never expected it to have the success it has had today).
which leads us to
1: Microsoft really is about world domination, and has a tremendously long track record of anti-competative behavior as a convicted monopolist to drive that point home. Microsoft really is about denying people choice, and has every intention of eradicating any viable alternative to their monopoly. Linux (even an arrogant distribution like Debian) has always been about choice, and Debian's occasional arrogance aside, this script's description as a "world domination utility" is almost certainly tongue in cheeck (c.f. "humor") and not meant seriously. In other words, yes, Microsoft (as defined by their own behavior) is Evil, and Linux (as defined by the behavior of its community) is generally Good.
And I say that as one who uses Gentoo and will never go back to Debian (ie. one who should "feel offended" if in fact I took this seriously, which I do not). It is a clever tool with a funny name based on an old, old joke, made all the funnier for having become a possibility (GNU/Linux really could "dominate" the world
If MS released the "Linux Upgrade Kit" that put whatever SKU of windows you wanted on the box, people would be furious.
They have (or haven't you been following their press releases), and while people are annoyed, no one seems to be particularly "furious." The reaction is more one of "rolling our eyes." A migration kit from Linux to Windows will get about as much use as a football bat...but it is fun to watch the behomeoth flounder and flail around.
I think .com should have this rule put into effect (like on so many other registries), then have some major cleaning up done and those who didn't have a registered name (i.e. free-viagra-now.com) be moved to the .info registry.
.com regardless.
.tm domain, e.g. uk.tm, us.tm, etc. then it would work pretty well, but that assumes (a) .tm isn't already a TLD for some country (I haven't checked), (b) each country administers its .tm according to its own trademark laws, and (c) it won't matter unless we can get the f*cking lawyers out of the other domains and into the .tm domain where they belong (good luck getting parasites out of anything).
While I agree that such a rule would have been nice from day one, it does have its problems.
1) trademarks are not unique
a) they are limited by "domain" (e.g. Macintosh(tm) for apples can exist in parallel with Macintosh(tm) for computers)
b) they are limited by geography (e.g. in the US, I can own "SourceMagic"(tm) in Illinois, while in Wisconsin someone else may have the same trademark for the same "domain", and national trademarks for x in Germany can be owned by one company, and a completely different company may have the same exact trademark registered in Canada or the United States).
This works for national domains, such as co.uk, where (a) there aren't state or local trademarks, only national trademarks (or they only allow national trademarks to use the domain), but it won't work for most trademarks in an international domain such as
Now, if one wanted to make a
I think it's interesting that initially the Americans tried to point the finger of possibility at just about anything capable of leaking built by the Russians, who of course have a zillion more years of experience building these things than we do...
References?
I recall both sides saying they had no idea where the problem was and that they were looking for it. I don't recall anyone placing any blame ahead of time, except perhaps for some slashdot trolls.
To get your German license, you will need official proof-of-address (Anmeldbecheinigung) and your passport. No fingerprints, but they have a good lock on who you are and where you live.
... we just thought it was cool that we got to be fingerprinted.
Exactly. When I first lived in Germany (1987) and had to get an Anmeldbescheinigung I was shocked. The idea of having to check in with the local constablary every time I moved (I worked a summer job in one city outside of Cologne, and went to school in Darmstadt, so I had to do this twice) of course invited me to compare that with my relative anonymouty in the United States. (Registering my boom box and paying a radio tax struck me as big brotherish and weird, too. Actually, that still strikes me as an unfortunate approach to funding of the public broadcasters, but compared to what is done by industry to our private sphere in the US, it is nevertheless quite benign).
Flash forward seventeen years (2004): I've been fingerprinted five (5) times (!!!) for my job: twice at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, twice at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, and once at the Chicago Board of Trade. Then there was that interesting opportunity in grade school, when a local law enforcement officer came and taught us a little about the police and the FBI, then offered to let anyone who wanted to be fingerprinted. At 10 years of age (IIRC) none of us were too aware of the privacy implications
By my second stay in Germany (working a summer job in Leverkusen) I'd come to appreciate the greater degree of freedom and privacy afforded my in Germany vs. that of the United States. No selling my phone number to telemarketers, no fingerprinting, nothing obvious or Big Brotherish as we've come to expect in the states.
Most Americans, upon finding to their surprise that they are more free in many places abroad than they are in their own land, find it to be truly ironic. I merely find it sand, to have seen a country slip so far toward authoritarianism in so short a time. Alas, I haven't worked in Germany since the mid-nineteen nineties, so emigration there is nigh unto impossible.
I do miss the privacy though, and the freedom.
If it was so obvious, why didn't you or any other person patent it first?
Maybe it was so obvious he did come up with it first. And likely realized it was so obvious it wasn't patentable, and so didn't even start the footrace to the patent office, much less win it. Or maybe he did try to patent the idea despite its obviousness, and despite having invented the idea first, lost the footrace to the patent office because his postal worker took a coffee break and the patent application didn't get shipped across the country in that day's mail.
In this day and age, when dozens of people independently "invent" the same thing more or less at the same time simply because it is an idea whose "time has come" (the pieces and infrastructure that make the realization of that idea are in place for the first time), it is the corporation with the fastest lawyers who wins the footrace to the patent office, denying any other inventors of the same technology the right to use their own inventions, much less anyone else from building upon them.
The number of patents for non-obvious methods are vastly outweighed by the number of obviouse, trivial, unenforcable patents that are issued and that remain profitable because challenging them in court is just too damn expensive, and there are just too many tens of thousands of the fucking things (enough to bankrupt the entire GDP in litigation costs if they were all to be challenged).
The result? Our free market of competition of free no more: it has been reduced to a planned economy of entitlement monopolies, and the stock market little more than a glorified futures market on said monopolies (at least in the medical and technical arenas).
Since when is the GPL propretiary?
cue Microsoft provocateurs, *BSD License zealots, and SCO apologists...
I can smell the flamage of the battle to come from here.
You are right. The anti-qt FUD is just that, FUD, and no less so for being propogated by zealots that were once representative of a more mainstream ("gentler, kinder, more corporate, less political") version of free software renamed open source (and who have replaced the politics of freedom with the politics of gratis beer, of subjective preferences vis-a-vis Gnome v. KDE, gtk v. qt, and Open Source non-GPL with GPL where it make sense to unerscore their position on gtk v. qt, while maintaining a hypocritically and diametrically opposed opinion on the very same license for the other 90% of the software that makes up the system they are trying to promote).
QT is GPLed, just as is the Linux kernel, gcc, and most of GNU. Any statement claiming qt is closed or proprietary is FUD and likely a troll (whether it is a Microsoft financed troll or not is an interesting debate for another time), as it is equivelent to saying that the GPL is closed or propriatery, a nonsensical stance taken by *BSD Licensing zealots, Microsofties, and others who would prefer to take the hard work of others and not give back in return, and resent not being allowed to do so.
I have no preference for qt vs. gtk, and I find both the GPL and BSD-style licenses to be useful in the appropriate place, but as you point out, only an idiot (syn. "troll"), a FUD-mongering zealot with an axe to grind, or an agent provocatuer from the anti-free software crowd (Microsoft et al) would seriously argue that a GPLed library is "closed."
So what the hell is it with that? Is America's hegemony so shaky that you can't stand the thought of another major country getting its technology base built up without wetting yourselves in abject terror?
Point of Order.
It isn't the American Hegemony that is shakey (though, perhaps it is), it is the poster's own faith in his/her own culture that is very shakey.
Understandable. With people like GW Bush running the country my faith in the long term prosperity, much less the survival, of the USA is pretty damn shakey.
Free Markets are great for some things (like trinkets, PCs, furniture, houses) and lousy for others (Nursing Homes, Healthcare, Roads and Highways).
As for the third worlds emergence as equal, capable competitors and partners in trade and science, I, as an American, am delighted for several reasons, including
Well, from what I gathered from the article and from my own understanding it sounds to me like he gets it. The spammers don't live in VA and did not purposely avail themselves of doing business in VA, so they didn't meet the threshold for establishing personal jurisdiction, at least according to the judge. Maybe if he had specific knowledge that the crap he was sending out was headed for Virginia it might be different.
They guy sent millions of SPAM to people all over the world. He couldn't reasonably expect not to be sending some SPAM to virginia, where in fact it is banned. Furthermore, it is his responsibility to know where he is conducting his business (the servers are located in VA, that is trivial to find out, and it was the SPAMmers responsibility as a businessman to ascertain that).
It is really quite stunning that ignorance has been held up by a federal judge as a legitimate defense, particularly in a case where ignorance of ones own bsuiness is (a) almost certainly feigned and (b) if true, a sign of negligence, not innocence.
Either way, the fact remains that the SPAMmer sent SPAM to VA residents in violation of VA law, and said SPAM originated from servers located in VA. If that isn't enough to determine that the jurisdiction is in fact in VA, then no law regarding the Internet, anywhere, is enforcable. While the libertarians might relish this thought, I don't think such a position is going to be tenable for very long. I would be surprised if AOL didn't win on appeal.
The law already covers this inherently. THe driver that causes the accident gets a ticket. Why is this law even needed?
Because they would like to empower the police to put a stop to dangerous behavior before it causes an accident. The prior law you cite only accounted for assigning blame after an accident had already occurred...it did little if anything to prevent accidents ahead of time, or to allow the police to do so if they observed someone behaving dangerously (like half the cell phone users on the road).
Now, this particular form of negligent driving (fiddling with a laptop while driving) is punishable, without the need for twisted metal and carnage first. I too agree that it is overly broad: a passenger navigating should be able to use GPSdrive (more effecient and really no different than using a map), and anyone should be able to use a cell phone provided they are using a handsfree set with voice-tagged numbers. However, fiddling with the thing and looking up names/numbers on the phone while driving is rightly prohibited.
The real issue is that the law hasn't looked at the technology close enough, or drawn the line finely enough, between legitimate, enabling technology (e.g. getting directions on a handsfree phone while driving, or having a navigating passenger use a computer to avoid getting lost) and stupid, moronic, negligent use of technology (browsing the web while driving, watching tv whilee driving, manually tuning the radio while driving, fiddling with one's cell phone while driving, or driving one handed while holding the cell phone up to one's ear). One can reasonably expect future revisions of the law to refine this, particularly as virtually every automobile gets sophisticated computer equipment and "glass cockpit" style displays installed in future models.
I installed OO.o for OS X the other day, and poked around a bit. Gotta admit, it isn't anywhere near as easy to use outa the box as either Office or AppleWorks, at least for me (got both installed).
You really should try running it under GNU/Linux instead (either intel Linux via VirtualPC, or PPC linux on another partition) if you'd like to see the current state of the art as far as Open Office is concerned.
As I found out, to my dismay when I tried to get my girlfriend up and running on Open Office with her Powerbook 17", Open Office for Mac is kludgy (runs under X11, not aqua), out of date (v. 1.0.3 vs. 1.1 in the Linux and Windoze world), and buggy (font issues, and it won't print to her HP all-in-one printer no matter how many sheep we burn in offering^H^H^H^H^H what workarounds are tried, and yes, I have exhausted all of the suggestions in the Apple fora as well as google searches too numerous to count).
I ended up (reluctantly) suggesting she stick with Microsoft Office for Mac for the time being, and we can revisit Open Office if and when it ever gets decent Mac support. It works fine for her, and she is happy again. Very happy, actually, as she is no longer running windows (read: her laptop doesn't crash like her old Dell Inspiron with Windows/ME did) and she can get the work done she needs to. Becoming entirely Microsoft free is something she'd like to do, but Open Office simply isn't ready on her platform.
In the interim I continue to run Open Office exclusively, under Linux via PowerPC on my Powerbook, and under Linux on my intel computers, exporting to MS format when I need to send her something she can edit.
That said, I think it has a lot of potential, and I'm anxious to see what the Aqua-native version will bring. And the folks over at OO.o admit that it's not for the faint-of-heart, and recommend it only for geek-y types at this time.
Indeed it does, and on platforms it does support natively it is very good. I too can't wait for an aqua version (1.1 hopefully), and I think Apple made a big mistake in not putting some muscle into getting a native release sooner. There are plenty of people switching to Apple out of loathing for Microsoft, my GF included, and telling them they'll still be buying and running MS Office is a surefire way to squandor an opportunity to wean people away from their competitor completely.
Al Gore made an honest claim about something that he was justly proud of. And somebody deliberately misquoted him to make it appear that he was claiming to have "invented the internet".
... right down there with Fox News and the National Equirer.
That "someone" who deliberately misrepresented what Al Gore said (and whose misrepresentation was then repeated by other, lazy journalists ad nauseum) would be Declan McCullagh of WiReD magazine, whose yellow journalism redefines the color yellow, and who enjoys enough of a rapport with slashdot editors to have his byline placed on any story of his slashdot links to (unlike, say, this story here, and just about every other story linked to).
He single handedly drew attention to the LiViD (Linux DVD) project by publishing a hysterical article about DVD pirates writing software (before it was even working, and knowing full well that the project wasn't about copying DVDs, it was about playing them on Linux, something one couldn't do back then. He subscribed to the mailing list, he knew exactly what he was doing.)
His career is littered with the destroyed public image of more people and projects than I can reasonably count, and his deliberate, premeditated sabataging of Al Gore by deliberately misquoting and misrepresenting him places him at the lowest level of journalism
Is the desire to feed one's children unethical? Particularly given that jobs are not exactly thick on the ground at the moment...
The willingness to do something unethical to feed your children is most assuredly unethical. To lend aid, support, and help to those doing something unethical, which detrimentally affects the ability of others to feed their children, is harmful and, yes, unethical.
"Wanting to feed your children" with no further datapoints is neither ethical nor unethical. Feed them what? Soup from the local soup kitchen? Cereal from the store (bought with your $CO-written paycheck for helping defame thousands of innocents and affect their ability to make a living)? Your neighbor's dog? Your neighbor?
Being willing to destroy the livelyhood of thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of others through deceit and deception, to defraud your investors through public misinformation, in order to feed your little brats is very, very unethical. Exactly as unethical if your motive were to buy crack cocain, or a hooker.
In this case it is how some people (SCO employees) have chosen to earn their money that is unethical, and that has absolutely nothing to do with how they intend to spend their ill-gotten gains.
Blood Money? Get a grip.
We're not talking about a company that makes its living selling crack in schoolyards and beating up people's grandmothers.
Most people understand that in common parlance "blood money" is often used to refer to ill-gotten gains, and does not require physical assault to apply. We are dealing with a company that has publicly stated its intention to deny thousands of volunteer software developers the right to use the products of their own work, to defraud fifteen hundred "licensees" (at least) of $699.00 (or $1399.00, at least) for each Linux box they run for a license that clearly states (in the very license itself) that it offers them nothing (and clearly places them in violation of the license under which they can redistribute Linux, i.e. does place anyone purchasing it and then distributing Linux in a position of being guilty of copyright violation), wish to deny millions access to inexpensive and powerful software legally written and given away through a PR campaign of deceipt and deception, and is clearly and obvously defrauding their investors of a tidy sum each day their stock trades. Such gains are most assuredly ill-gotten, and refering to such as "blood money" well within the common usage of the phrase even if it does run afoul of your simplistic, literal thinking.
If everyone quit the instant that the company did something that didn't line up exactly with their idea of a correct decision, nobody would have a work experience with more than 3 months at a stretch.
Disagreeing with policy is one thing. Supporting a company and continuing to work for it when it is engaged in the kinds of activities outlined above is something else.
It is time you got a grip, and stopped justifying unconscionable behavior merely because doing the right thing happens to be difficult.