The second that Bulgaria came forward and said the FBI had to nab an OpEd writer for the NY Times because of something he said on the paper's web site, the paper, the ACLU, and any # of congressmen, senators, and lawyers would start making the argument about the fact that a world wide convention can not supercede the constitution that governs this nation.
Only popular speech would garner such protection... the default modus operandi would be to adhere to the treaty and string up, figuratively speeking, the offending speeker. If the offendor against Bulgaria's Sacred Copyright were lucky enough to get sufficient attention I'm sure everyone, including the much maligned (and, ironicly, most deserving of our respect) ACLU, would jump into the fray on their behalf.
But what about the ten thousand other people, little guys like you and I who never draw the atteniton of more than a dozen friends and acquaintances? We would enjoy no such protections... our web sites or other offending material would simply be expunged, censored, in accordance with international law, with no one but our own ever thinning wallets to defend a fading right against the inertia and will of a hundred governments.
Don't kid yourself. This sort of thing will tip the scales immensly to favor censorship and corporate content control over an individual's right to free speech. One or two poster children notwithstanding, the vast majority of us will be forced into doing what the Copyright Cartels have been demanding for the last two years: "Get your bitch asses back on the couch and shut the hell up."
You, like I, may refuse to go back to a passive existence as a couch potato without a fight, and certainly not without complaint, but in the end, do either of us, much less the many thousands of others so affected, have the wealth to mount anything even approaching an effective defense against such an onslaught? I sincerely doubt it.
I'm neither promoting nor critisizing the current state of legislation, but it's useless without worldwide standardization.
Hogwash.
Put another way: for a useless piece of legislation, Copyright Law certainly has allowed some very powerful, and very wealthy, Copyright Cartels to form (RIAA, MPAA, etc.), all without the "global standardization" you seem to hold in such high regard.
One of the unwritten checks and balances on the current IP system has been the diversity of intellectual property law, which has allowed certain documents which would otherwise have been completely suppressed using one nation's laws or another to remain a part of the global information sphere. This check isn't enough to reign in the ever more draconian intellectual property regimes of the west, but it has allowed information to get out, into the public hands, where it could do some good despite efforts at outright censorship based in no small part one copyright law of one location or another.
Imagine Chinese copyright law claiming ownership of any footage containing any Chinese Officials or Uniformed troups. Tiannamen Square would never have seen the light of day. Those are the kinds of unconstitutional (in the USA) laws which the treaty will require our government to enforce. What little regard the authorities in the US have left for the constitution will be swept under the rug with the all-encompassing excuse "the Hague Convention requires us to take these actions." Yes, someone, somewhere may have the cash and be willing to put the rest of their life on the line to fight such actions, and perhaps the supreme court will even see its way past its own petty politics to uphold the constitution (although there recent track record is anything but promising in this regard), but in the meantime we will all have been very effectively stripped of what few rights we have. Ditto for every other nation on the planet.
All these freedoms, and the sacrifices of our forefathers they represent, squandered, simply to preserve the outdated business models of organizations that produce the least worthwile things in our culture: popular music and Hollywood tripe.
One should instead question the screwiness of a value system in which a kid would rather die than be fingerpointed for doing something bad.
One should also question a value system that makes what amounts to a high-school prank a serious crime, where a child could and, it appears, was threatened with jail time. The fact that the threat may have been empty was apparently irrelevant to the outcome in this case.
Changing one's grades is, at least in a moral sense, an academic offense. Not a crime, whatever the politicos may be saying, or defining, in an effort to curry 30 second favors from the miniscule percentage of the vapid public who still bothers to cast a vote. The child should have been suspended, perhaps even expelled, but he never should have been threatened with jail time. The fact that the laws are written such as to define what he did in criminal, rather than acedemic, terms underscores just how flawed our entire system of values is. The kneejerk reaction of just about everybody, including (and perhaps as a result of) the media, whenever a child is caught and punished for cracking merely confirms the ethical bankrupcy of our culture, not to mention the overwhelming stupidity of the masses of which it is composed.
By your argument your personal information (credit/health/etc records, in digital, not hard-copy form) does not belong to you. Therefore any company can freely use/abuse this information for any purpose. You don't care right, because you don't own that information, and information wants to be free?
The connection you draw is not only false, it is completely fictional. Having a right to privacy is not the same as "owning" your private information at all. It is merely the restriction, under penalty of law, of certain organizations using, selling, or otherwise distributing information gleaned about your private life.
This is a far cry from laws which restrict the flow of information and assign ownership of said information, ideas, concepts, etc. to someone as their "private property," despite the fact that the information in question is neither private, nor, by its very nature, "property" by any rational definition of the term.
ObSlavery: If anyone here for a moment doubts that they are a slave to the state, just try not working. Now try getting fifty thousand of your colleagues to do the same. If you should succeed, you will find yourself being forced back to work at the point of a government gun. Just ask airline pilots, nurses, doctors, policemen, firemen, air traffic controllers, bus drivers, or train engineers. Your right to chose whether or not to work vanishes even more quickly than your Human Rights do under the new UN Commission the moment other likeminded folk join you and happen to inconvinience the overpaid whores we elect to Washington every couple of years.
Although your post was clearly meant as a lighthearted joke, this is as good a place as any to point out that Goodwins law is a piece of intellectually bankrupt deficant.
It basically boils down to this: "Let's take a widely known event with philisophical, political, and moral implications and lessons which resonate with nearly everyone who has lived any portion of their life in the 20th century, and make it off-limits to any discussion of said topics, regardless of how much light it might shed on a subject, either through direct comparison or juxtupostion."
Those who embrace the notion are IMHO idiots who can't be bothered to author even the tritest of rebuttals, or, alternatively, are those who are actively trying to engineer the entire experience of the holocaust, with all of its lessons of history, out of the public consciousness. Goodwin's Law indeed. Hrmpf.
What we are witnessing, and living through, is the decline of our civilization. This country was founded on high ideals and moral principles. Sadly, the ultimate goal today is to ruthlessly make as much money as possible. The current rampant abuse of the patent system is just the tip of the iceberg.
At one time the "American Dream" had little to do with money directly. It used to be the notion that one could go to a free country and achieve everything they were capable of, without governmental hinderence. For some people this was the practice of their non-mainstream religion, for others it was the persuit of philosophies or studies suppressed elsewhere, for other the chance to explore the unknown, and, yes, for some it was the opportunity to persue wealth.
Now, the media have all come together and redefined the "American Dream" solely in terms of the persuit of wealth, even going so far as to equate it with winning the lottery (as if, prior to the 20th century, there had ever even been such an absurd notion).
At one time laws were intended to benefit society, and the production of wealth was but one component in an entire series of concepts which together were required to benefit society (others included free education, libraries, fire department and water services, land grants, etc.) This is not to say society was ideal, as at the same time there were horrific things going on (the enslavement of black Americans, the wholesale theft of land from native Americans, etc.), but only to point out that, at one time, laws and politicians were expected to serve the voting population of the country, and to a fair degree did so.
Now there isn't even the pretense of laws in the United States serving the American public, much less society as a whole. Is it any wonder, with our willingness as individuals (by and large) to sell every ideal down the river in the name of profit and income, that our government, as our representatives, behaves any differently?
Disgusting, yes, Reprehensible, yes. Self defeating and ultimately destructive (particularly with respect to government granted monopolies such as patents, copyrights, and other forms of IP), yes. But, given the direction the majority of the American people chose to go in 1980 and have continued toward since, hardly surprising. Fortunately for us, and the world, these sorts of things are self correcting, even if it means the US economy stagnating and even going third world before people become aware enough to start demanding the kinds of reforms which are necessary.
Our agricultural methods have already led to the desertification of the worlds richest lands, namely the fertile crescent that was the birthplace of our civilization. The once fertile Tigris and Euphratis valley is now desert, primarilly because the land was farmed until the soil simply died and was consumed by an ever-growing dustbowl.
Similar agricultural catastrophe is believed to have played a signifigant role in the downfall of the ancient Mayan civilization, and has plagued other agricultural regions as well.
Already in the world's so-called bread-basket (the American mid-west) we have lost well over half of the topsoil that was here just a century ago. Wind and water erosion, coupled with agricultural procedures which are not sustainable, are literally killing the land.
Is there a way to perform agriculture without killing the land? Yes. Is there a way of doing so and feeding even half of the people currently residing on the planet? No, not even if every square inch of arable land were converted, with the sole purpose of creating food for humans (read: no more parks, no more building above ground, no more wildlife refuges, no more wildlife).
Worse, it would do no good. You could use every square inch of the planet to produce food for humans, and have the most effecient distribution system possible, and there would still be widespread starvation. Why? Because populations always grow to meet their supply of food, whether that population consists of rats in a cage or humans in the wild is immaterial. "Meeting the supply of food" in a biological sense doesn't mean everyone is well fed, it means that the poluation is as large as the food supply will permit, which generally means that a significant portion of that population is living on the edge of starvation.
Population pressures aren't just a question of getting what was grown today into someone's mouth, or about elbow room to build a house, it is a question of sustainability. Daniel Quinne has written some excellent works on this very subject (and its ramifications). "Ishmael" and "The Story of B" in particular are quite insighteful and thought provoking.
Umm, click on the 'Parent' link on my post. I'm not disagreeing with you or attributing to you stuff you didn't say. I was replying to someone who replied to you, and through the magic of Slashdot moderation and your preferences, my post came to look like it was just under yours instead of under the person who replied to you.
Oops! You're right... my bad. Until recently I had been reading with a threashold of -1, now I've set it to 2.
Since we basically agreed on the point being made I was a little confused by the tone of your comment... suddenly it all make sense. Sorry.:-)
If you steal a car from a dealer, you are not depriving the dealer of the original product. The dealer will still be able to drive to work, because it wasn't his car. You are depriving the dealer of the money he would have made had he been able to sell the car.
Refusing taxation without representation is wrong because it denies the king the money he would've gotten had you given it to him.
That statement is just as stupidly circular as the one you just made about the car dealer.
I never said what you attributed to me. You've either taken someone elses statement out of context, or fabricated a blatent absurdity and attributed it to me. Either way it is an inaccurate characterization. What I said was:
[...] copyright violation is not even remotely similiar to theft. Theft and stealing deny the victim the original product (it is "taken away" from the victim). If I steal a car, the owner will find themself walking (or hopping a cab) home after their visit to the local precinct to report the crime. If I replicate the car and drive off in the copy, the owner is denied nothing. Nor is the manufacturer.
However, your example does underscore how stupid the argument that copyright violation somehow equals theft is, as denying someone the money they "would have made" can be many things (e.g. good competition, frugality, a lack of desire for their product, good taste, etc. etc.), but theft it is not.
Your comments with respect to compensation being artificially tied to replication costs, and the obsolescence of our copyright laws given today's technology, is absolutely correct IMHO. Unfortunately, changes in the law are being made to support obsolete business models and cartels in a very luddite fashion, rather than modernizing the method whereby the creator (be s/he an automobile designer or a musician) is compensated to be more compatible with today's technologies.
Marriem-Webster is a member of the Copyright Cartels (they own copyrights on their dictionary, after all). They have as much a vested interest in promoting the kind of newspeak so many of the Copyright Barrons engage in. Now, as to whether the Cartel's terminology was imposed on the public first, then wandered into the "official" definition as presented by one of the Cartel's members, or was presented as part of such a definition early in the cycle, is a chicken-and-egg argument.
The fact remains that copyright violation has nothing whatsoever to do with stealing, or piracy for that matter, as the terms are understood by reasonably literate people, and certainly have nothing whatsoever to do with one another as far as the law is concerned.
Is it really all that surprising to you that IP Companies such as Merriem-Webster would insert their self serving, synthetic terminology into their "official" works? How better to control the public dialog than to control the very definitions used to communcate with, and redefine them over time to promote one's own agenda? Speaking of which, I just looked up the term "liberate" and did not find a single reference to the demolition of Vietnamese villages suspected of harboring Viet Cong (despite that "official," and later colloqual, usage of the term which goes back much farther than the notion of copyright violators somehow having traits in common with murder and pillage on the high seas does). Looks like Merriem-Webster is rather selective about what newspeak terms they let into their "official" definitions, and which ones they do not.
George Orwell was remarkably prophetic in his description of how language would be used to shape and ultimately control human thought. His only error was to assume such power would be wielded by governments, when in fact it is the Media Conglomerates (which include publishers and Marriam-Webster).
This is akin to saying "piracy = copyright violation because the Movie Industry says so!"
I find it both amusing and profoundly irritating that Copyright Cartel Apologists continue to engage in their use of "newspeak" to promote their corporate agendas.
Copyright violation is not stealing. It is not theft. It is not piracy. It is copyright violation. Even a quick reading of the law, and of court decisions, makes this abundantly obvious to the most casual of observers. There is a reason for this, and I'll say it again (since there seem to be so many thick headed people who can't keep their terminology even remotely straight): copyright violation is not even remotely similiar to theft. Theft and stealing deny the victim the original product (it is "taken away" from the victim). If I steal a car, the owner will find themself walking (or hopping a cab) home after their visit to the local precinct to report the crime. If I replicate the car and drive off in the copy, the owner is denied nothing. Nor is the manufacturer. Yes, the manufacturer will scream that my unauthorized replication of the car has denied them much needed profits, profits based on a business model that predated widespread replicator use, but that is hardly theft. It is nothing more than sour grapes because their business model has become obsolete and they are either going to have to change those business models or look for another line of work.
Of course they will use their existing capital to buy legislation from congress to protect their business model, just as the existing Copyright Cartels have done now that widespread information replicators (read: computers) are in use. And of course our congress, which routinely sells itself to anyone with cash like cheap whores, will readily oblige.
That changes nothing. Copyright violation is indeed a crime (and a rather synthetic one at that), with its own definitions, and its own set of punishments (which don't really resemble the definitions or punishments of theft at all, much less piracy on the high seas). I'm sure that once nano technology allows widespread replication of material goods, providing the promise of prosperity for every human being on the planet, these same "intellectual" property laws will be used to keep the masses impoverished and beholden to an oligarchy of outdated corporations, exactly as they are doing to our artistic culture today.
Even then, by no rational defintion, will unauthorized replication be even remotely akin to theft, just as copyright violation has nothing whatsoever to do with stealing or piracy, except in the minds of those whose limited imaginations and limitless greed compell them to do all they can to keep the (western) world in a state of cultural impoverishment.
The biggest thing to hit in the follow-up brief would be to point out the logical inconsistencies in the DA/MPAA's arguments which Michael so clearly pointed out. The argument about how a DVD that eventually falls into the public domain will be accessed struck me as a particularly powerful one.
Indeed. There was an article some time ago linked to by slashdot, which described ongoing difficulties with preserving existing data and knowledge as storage media changes. It is a problem libraries, data wharehouses, companies, and even individuals have (how do you play those old 12" records when no more turntables are manufactured, or they have become so specialized and expensive as to be unobtainable by all but the most wealthy?). These problems have arisen without encryption, without any malicious efforts to make the data inaccessible. Quite the contrary, information is being lost over time already. How much worse will this become with the added barriars of encryption, against which even research is being suppressed, quite probably until it is too late.
Another issue touched upon in the article is the dubious notion that studios will make content available in an "unencrypted" form once their copyrights expire. Two facts point out the absurdity of this notion: (1) The movie studios have been aggressively extending copyrights in order to keep copyrighted material (including such icons of western culture as "Mickey Mouse") out of the public domain (cf. Sonny Bono Copyright Act) and (2) The studios have a history of destroying films once their copyrights have expired, rather than release the material into the public domain as their social contract, per the constitution, requires. Taken together these two facts, along with the DMCA, clearly shows the ugly situation we have gotten ourselves into, where historians, librarians, and other preservers of information are legally banned from doing their work until the material they wish to preserve has become inaccessible due to encryption which cannot legally be circumvented, and for which research is actively suppressed through legal thuggary, or has been destroyed altogether. The result? It is very likely that almost no cultural heritage from our time will be handed down to our grandchildren, except perhaps as a proprietary, commercial work for which the copyright has been extended to an even more outrageous duration... again.
It is almost like we are going into another dark age, where knowledge is suppressed for financial gain, and ultimately lost.
We are not "heading into another dark age," we're already there. Many have argued for a long time that the cooperation between industry and academic instututions would undermine the independence of academia, and hence our entire intellectual foundation as a society. These dire predictions were being made in the 1980s when Reagan and his cronies gutted funding for our colleges and universities.
The result has been unambiguous: colleges and universities have turned more and more to private industry for funding, sacrificing their intellectual independence in the process. This example, where Xerox may likely have played the pivotol role in caving to the RIAA, is but one obvious example of what is happening over and over again on campuses everywhere.
Couple the erosion of our foundation of intellectual freedom by making our institutions financially beholden and in some cases even intertwined with corporate entities (which are easilly pressured by threats to revinue, licensing, and/or bad publicity) with laws which criminalize intellectual activities such as reverse engineering and certain applications of cryptographic mathematics and you have, by and large, successfully gutted independent thought in your society. The rest of the dominos will fall like clockwork, when and as they offend or run counter to the goals of those who set these destructive policies.
The "cranks" were right, and the foundation of our intellectual thought, and of dissent in general, are virtually gone.
Back in my mudding days (circa 1992) there was at least one rudimentary graphical mud. The resolution was terrible, the objects blocky, the color limited, but depending on how the patent is read it would probably constitute prior art. 3d is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. Does hitting ctrl-r and ctrl-l to turn left and right and displaying a still of the same room count? Certainly 3d, if not as finely tuned as, say, a Doom or Quake interface, but where does one draw the line? 90 degrees between frames, or 0.00001 degree? Communications and chatting between characters was certainly a major part of the game.
On what concerns the arguments about local police doing nothing against criminal hackers then I can state this is pure BS. In fact in every major Russian city there is now a special department called 'Direction "R"' that fights computer crimes. Maybe the guys are not as effective as FBI "bright minds". But still is amazing to see how FBI treats their colleagues.
Just when I'm about to give up on slashdot as a source of never ending, mindless drivel I find a gem like this, buried beneath the countless posts posturing and belaboring the obvious. I for one had no idea that Russian law enforcement was this involved in tracking down computer criminals (as my other rather provocative post in this thread demonstrates). This is the sort of thing we here in the west hear nothing about, and it colors our perceptions of Russia inappropriately as a result.
More interesting is that Chelyabinsk is one of the later military centers in Russia. So I believe that if police is sleeping there (Direction R is a police force) than the ex-KGB is surely not sleeping.
Unless, of course, it is ex-KGB freelancers that are engaged in these activities, with friends and contacts within the existing law enforcement structure running cover for them. I have no idea if that is the case for these two individuals... somehow I doubt it, as ex-KGB would never have been stupid enough to fall into the FBI's hands. I say this not to insult Russia but to point out a grim reality... this sort of thing happens in the United States more than we like to admit, it is certainly plausible that it could happen in Russia as well.
So I can take only one conclusion from FBI's actions: bravado.
That is almost certainly the case. It is also a political game -- they can trot out successes like this one come budget time and probably get more funding as a result.
What's next? SEALs landing in some Mokrovka village to catch a small group of teenagers playing a cracked Xbox?
No, but if you are native American, speaking out against the government in Washington, watch out!
Give the russian extortionists the electric chair and reprimand the FBI Agents for violating Russian law and possibly violating American law. Allow the agents to pay their fines out of the confiscated funds, the balance of which are to be used to fund further anti-cracking/extortion campaigns...
Seriously, I wonder if Russians realize that their government's unwillingness or inability to persue these sorts of criminals makes them look to the rest of the world like a haven of corruption and crime. As appearances go: Chechnya is to Russia as Russia to the rest of the world...
Moderators on crack or astroturfers out in force?
on
Mandrake 8.0 Comes Out
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· Score: 4
+5 insightful? Looks like the same Microsoft lackeys that rated my comment from +4 interesting to +5 funny (thereby prejuding readers against the content before they've read a single word) are out abusing the moderation system once again. Moderating up this kind of disinformation is disingenous, indeed downright disgusting.
As others have pointed out, Mandrake forked from red hat years ago and make significant contributions to numerous free software projects, not the least of which is providing an easy way for the rest of us to make financial contributions to the project of our choice without having to do a bunch of research first. This will probably translate into a sizable increase in contributions from people like myself with money to give, but not time to do the necessary digging to find out how.
Finally, Mandrake stands on its own, with its own unique and compelling features, not the least of which are its ease of installation and ease of use. I can give my aunt a copy of Mandrake 7.2 and she can install and use it with little or no help, unlike the copy of Windows ME she had.
Red Hat is a very nice distribution, and I wish them success. Likewise for Suse, Debian, and, yes, Mandrake.
The timestamps on the posts (assuming such are rigorously kept) should prove that the original post by you was made prior to the post you accuse of plagerism (please use correct terminology, piracy... rape, theft, and murder on the high seas... has nothing to do with what happened to you).
Given the availability of this evidence, rather then deleting the post, couldn't the slashdot editors reattribute the post (and karma) to the proven original author when such disputes arise. No content is changed, only attribution.
This kind of policy would have the dual effect of rewarding the original author for posting a very sound argument, while removing the incentive (whoring for karma) of plagerizing the posts of others. Most importantly, it would avoid removing a positive contribution to the discussion (in terms of the content, which deserves the +5 score even if the plagerist does not).
I must say, the number of apologist posts downplaying what is an obvious mass grab of other peoples intellectual property on the part of Microsoft is downright amusing. The amount of spin being put on this is worthy of the finest Clinton or Busch media machines.
Anyone reading the plane English of this license cannot help but see that, very clearly, the end user is required to grant Microsoft any and every right to their ideas, their work, even their patents, just by processing their information through a piece of software which happens to use Passport as an authentication mechanism. This could, in the future, include any document written by Micosoft Word (using passport to authenticate the author or encrypt the file as a new feature, etc.), sent through a Microsoft mail server, or served from a Microsoft Web server.
Microsoft has a well documented history of stealing other peoples work (and getting sued for it, and being required by the court to make appropriate reparations to the aggrieved parties). This isnt about avoiding frivolous lawsuits, this is about legalizing a reprehensible tactic they already engage in: theft from their customers, their competitors, and anyone else whose idea they like.
There is, however, a silver lining to this dark cloud. Two states have already, very foolishly, passed UCITA legislation, giving this sort of EULA the force of law. One would hope the courts would overturn such an onerous condition, particularly in light of the fact that nearly every party to this agreement has no idea what theyve agreed to, but one cannot assume reason will always prevail.
If it doesnt, it wouldnt be too terribly difficult for the authors of Apache, sendmail, various USENET and chat servers, and so forth, to add a clause to their respective licenses reading something like this:
By inputting data or engaging in any other form of communication with or through this software, or any of its associated services, you grant the Free Software Community and the world at large the rights to use, modify, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, publish, sublicense, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any such communication and exploit any proprietary rights in such communication, including but not limited to rights under copyright, trademark, service mark or patent laws.
This would be a potent weapon indeed for the Free Software community to strike a possibly leathal blow to copyright and patent law, once and for all (until such a time as another court rethinks this kind of thing, or a law is passed making such onerous and unreasonable property grabs illegal). Much of the very infrastructure of the Internet is powered by free software of one sort or another. If the courts should uphold this kind of behavior, we as a Community are in a position to use it in liberating far more knowledge and intellectual property, doing the Copyright and Patent Barons far more damage (and correspondingly far more good for free science and free software) than they could ever do to us. We arent compelled to use their software, but if they are using the internet at all, they are almost certainly using ours.
You are correct, and I was a little fast and loose with my terminology. The MPAA is in a strategic alliance with the DVD Forum. Both are engaged in legal thuggary against the Free Software community, with the DVD Forum leading the charge.
While the Japanese Anime studios are not, in and of themselves, members of the MPAA (the MPAA is, after all, a consortium of American companies), they do pay royalties and fees to the DVD Forum to publish their material in that format, which fees do play a large part in financing the DVD Forum's attack on Free Software dvd players for Linux and other alternative OSes (including the arrest and detainment of a 15-year old Norwegian programmer).
I cannot comment on what, if any, Japanese media consortia Anime producers may be a part of, or what, if any, stance they take on Free Software, but I can unequivocably say that, every time you purchase a DVD with any kind of motion picture content on it you are in fact helping to finance a large and very potent attack against the Free Software community.
If you cannot forgo the immediate gratification of purchasing DVDs and similar consumer products despite the knowledge that doing so harms the very community you believe yourself to be a part of that is your perogative. However, it is disingenuous to use semantics to imply that purchasing a particular product (e.g. Anime DVDs) is not harmful to a particular movement (e.g. the Free Software movement), when in fact the opposite is true.
Generally speaking, the more intelligent your comments, the more whiny, intellectually challenged trolls you are likely to receive. Don't feed them, they revel in your attention. Ignore them, and watch years of their life get chewed away by their impotent rage... a favor in that it shortens their empty, meaningless existence.
I for one thank you for your mirror. While the download to work (256k link) wasn't lightning fast, I did log into my home machine (21st Century) and do a wget that got the whole thing in less than 2 minutes. Hot Damn!:-)
... if it is a slow news day I'd much rather have kernel 0.0.x releases announced than read some review of the latest anime release on DVD, the former which holds little interest for me and the latter which I have been actively boycotting for more than a year now (and I must say in light of the MPAA's implacable attack on Free Software authors and users over the last year, I find it profoundly depressing that a site which claims to be a forum for Free Software news and advocacy will, in effect, promote the products which help to finance such attacks, but that is a rant for another day).
Which just goes to show there are numerous tastes and interests among slashdot readers, some of whome wait breathlessly for the next point release of any software.
More seriously, these announcements are I think more relevant early on in the new kernel cycle as more fundamental fixes are typically included... I would hope such stories would diminish about the time 2.4.11 is being released.
...and learning to write screenplays at 36 (are they going to suck as much as The Matrix?) doesn't dis-prove that you can learn easier when you are younger...
Point well taken. I wasn't trying to disprove anything, merely cite by example that learning a new skill as one grows older isn't a problem at all. As for it being easier to learn when young, that is true of some things (languages) at particularly early years (before six or eight years of age being the typical ages cited), but is certainly unproven for anything beyond that. For example, IFAIK it is unproven that learning German at 21 is easier than learning German would be at 31 or 41.
To answer your question, it is quite likely that my screenplays will suck far worse than the Matrix.:-)
I am 36. I turn 37 in April. Birthdays don't necessarilly match year-end dates or OS anniversaries precisely. To clarify, I began playing with Linux early in 1992.
Slashdot Mirror
The second that Bulgaria came forward and said the FBI had to nab an OpEd writer for the NY Times because of something he said on the paper's web site, the paper, the ACLU, and any # of congressmen, senators, and lawyers would start making the argument about the fact that a world wide convention can not supercede the constitution that governs this nation.
... the default modus operandi would be to adhere to the treaty and string up, figuratively speeking, the offending speeker. If the offendor against Bulgaria's Sacred Copyright were lucky enough to get sufficient attention I'm sure everyone, including the much maligned (and, ironicly, most deserving of our respect) ACLU, would jump into the fray on their behalf.
... our web sites or other offending material would simply be expunged, censored, in accordance with international law, with no one but our own ever thinning wallets to defend a fading right against the inertia and will of a hundred governments.
Only popular speech would garner such protection
But what about the ten thousand other people, little guys like you and I who never draw the atteniton of more than a dozen friends and acquaintances? We would enjoy no such protections
Don't kid yourself. This sort of thing will tip the scales immensly to favor censorship and corporate content control over an individual's right to free speech. One or two poster children notwithstanding, the vast majority of us will be forced into doing what the Copyright Cartels have been demanding for the last two years: "Get your bitch asses back on the couch and shut the hell up."
You, like I, may refuse to go back to a passive existence as a couch potato without a fight, and certainly not without complaint, but in the end, do either of us, much less the many thousands of others so affected, have the wealth to mount anything even approaching an effective defense against such an onslaught? I sincerely doubt it.
I'm neither promoting nor critisizing the current state of legislation, but it's useless without worldwide standardization.
Hogwash.
Put another way: for a useless piece of legislation, Copyright Law certainly has allowed some very powerful, and very wealthy, Copyright Cartels to form (RIAA, MPAA, etc.), all without the "global standardization" you seem to hold in such high regard.
One of the unwritten checks and balances on the current IP system has been the diversity of intellectual property law, which has allowed certain documents which would otherwise have been completely suppressed using one nation's laws or another to remain a part of the global information sphere. This check isn't enough to reign in the ever more draconian intellectual property regimes of the west, but it has allowed information to get out, into the public hands, where it could do some good despite efforts at outright censorship based in no small part one copyright law of one location or another.
Imagine Chinese copyright law claiming ownership of any footage containing any Chinese Officials or Uniformed troups. Tiannamen Square would never have seen the light of day. Those are the kinds of unconstitutional (in the USA) laws which the treaty will require our government to enforce. What little regard the authorities in the US have left for the constitution will be swept under the rug with the all-encompassing excuse "the Hague Convention requires us to take these actions." Yes, someone, somewhere may have the cash and be willing to put the rest of their life on the line to fight such actions, and perhaps the supreme court will even see its way past its own petty politics to uphold the constitution (although there recent track record is anything but promising in this regard), but in the meantime we will all have been very effectively stripped of what few rights we have. Ditto for every other nation on the planet.
All these freedoms, and the sacrifices of our forefathers they represent, squandered, simply to preserve the outdated business models of organizations that produce the least worthwile things in our culture: popular music and Hollywood tripe.
One should instead question the screwiness of a value system in which a kid would rather die than be fingerpointed for doing something bad.
One should also question a value system that makes what amounts to a high-school prank a serious crime, where a child could and, it appears, was threatened with jail time. The fact that the threat may have been empty was apparently irrelevant to the outcome in this case.
Changing one's grades is, at least in a moral sense, an academic offense. Not a crime, whatever the politicos may be saying, or defining, in an effort to curry 30 second favors from the miniscule percentage of the vapid public who still bothers to cast a vote. The child should have been suspended, perhaps even expelled, but he never should have been threatened with jail time. The fact that the laws are written such as to define what he did in criminal, rather than acedemic, terms underscores just how flawed our entire system of values is. The kneejerk reaction of just about everybody, including (and perhaps as a result of) the media, whenever a child is caught and punished for cracking merely confirms the ethical bankrupcy of our culture, not to mention the overwhelming stupidity of the masses of which it is composed.
By your argument your personal information (credit/health/etc records, in digital, not hard-copy form) does not belong to you. Therefore any company can freely use/abuse this information for any purpose. You don't care right, because you don't own that information, and information wants to be free?
The connection you draw is not only false, it is completely fictional. Having a right to privacy is not the same as "owning" your private information at all. It is merely the restriction, under penalty of law, of certain organizations using, selling, or otherwise distributing information gleaned about your private life.
This is a far cry from laws which restrict the flow of information and assign ownership of said information, ideas, concepts, etc. to someone as their "private property," despite the fact that the information in question is neither private, nor, by its very nature, "property" by any rational definition of the term.
ObSlavery: If anyone here for a moment doubts that they are a slave to the state, just try not working. Now try getting fifty thousand of your colleagues to do the same. If you should succeed, you will find yourself being forced back to work at the point of a government gun. Just ask airline pilots, nurses, doctors, policemen, firemen, air traffic controllers, bus drivers, or train engineers. Your right to chose whether or not to work vanishes even more quickly than your Human Rights do under the new UN Commission the moment other likeminded folk join you and happen to inconvinience the overpaid whores we elect to Washington every couple of years.
Although your post was clearly meant as a lighthearted joke, this is as good a place as any to point out that Goodwins law is a piece of intellectually bankrupt deficant.
It basically boils down to this: "Let's take a widely known event with philisophical, political, and moral implications and lessons which resonate with nearly everyone who has lived any portion of their life in the 20th century, and make it off-limits to any discussion of said topics, regardless of how much light it might shed on a subject, either through direct comparison or juxtupostion."
Those who embrace the notion are IMHO idiots who can't be bothered to author even the tritest of rebuttals, or, alternatively, are those who are actively trying to engineer the entire experience of the holocaust, with all of its lessons of history, out of the public consciousness. Goodwin's Law indeed. Hrmpf.
What we are witnessing, and living through, is the decline of our civilization. This country was founded on high ideals and moral principles. Sadly, the ultimate goal today is to ruthlessly make as much money as possible. The current rampant abuse of the patent system is just the tip of the iceberg.
At one time the "American Dream" had little to do with money directly. It used to be the notion that one could go to a free country and achieve everything they were capable of, without governmental hinderence. For some people this was the practice of their non-mainstream religion, for others it was the persuit of philosophies or studies suppressed elsewhere, for other the chance to explore the unknown, and, yes, for some it was the opportunity to persue wealth.
Now, the media have all come together and redefined the "American Dream" solely in terms of the persuit of wealth, even going so far as to equate it with winning the lottery (as if, prior to the 20th century, there had ever even been such an absurd notion).
At one time laws were intended to benefit society, and the production of wealth was but one component in an entire series of concepts which together were required to benefit society (others included free education, libraries, fire department and water services, land grants, etc.) This is not to say society was ideal, as at the same time there were horrific things going on (the enslavement of black Americans, the wholesale theft of land from native Americans, etc.), but only to point out that, at one time, laws and politicians were expected to serve the voting population of the country, and to a fair degree did so.
Now there isn't even the pretense of laws in the United States serving the American public, much less society as a whole. Is it any wonder, with our willingness as individuals (by and large) to sell every ideal down the river in the name of profit and income, that our government, as our representatives, behaves any differently?
Disgusting, yes, Reprehensible, yes. Self defeating and ultimately destructive (particularly with respect to government granted monopolies such as patents, copyrights, and other forms of IP), yes. But, given the direction the majority of the American people chose to go in 1980 and have continued toward since, hardly surprising. Fortunately for us, and the world, these sorts of things are self correcting, even if it means the US economy stagnating and even going third world before people become aware enough to start demanding the kinds of reforms which are necessary.
Our agricultural methods have already led to the desertification of the worlds richest lands, namely the fertile crescent that was the birthplace of our civilization. The once fertile Tigris and Euphratis valley is now desert, primarilly because the land was farmed until the soil simply died and was consumed by an ever-growing dustbowl.
Similar agricultural catastrophe is believed to have played a signifigant role in the downfall of the ancient Mayan civilization, and has plagued other agricultural regions as well.
Already in the world's so-called bread-basket (the American mid-west) we have lost well over half of the topsoil that was here just a century ago. Wind and water erosion, coupled with agricultural procedures which are not sustainable, are literally killing the land.
Is there a way to perform agriculture without killing the land? Yes. Is there a way of doing so and feeding even half of the people currently residing on the planet? No, not even if every square inch of arable land were converted, with the sole purpose of creating food for humans (read: no more parks, no more building above ground, no more wildlife refuges, no more wildlife).
Worse, it would do no good. You could use every square inch of the planet to produce food for humans, and have the most effecient distribution system possible, and there would still be widespread starvation. Why? Because populations always grow to meet their supply of food, whether that population consists of rats in a cage or humans in the wild is immaterial. "Meeting the supply of food" in a biological sense doesn't mean everyone is well fed, it means that the poluation is as large as the food supply will permit, which generally means that a significant portion of that population is living on the edge of starvation.
Population pressures aren't just a question of getting what was grown today into someone's mouth, or about elbow room to build a house, it is a question of sustainability. Daniel Quinne has written some excellent works on this very subject (and its ramifications). "Ishmael" and "The Story of B" in particular are quite insighteful and thought provoking.
Umm, click on the 'Parent' link on my post. I'm not disagreeing with you or attributing to you stuff you didn't say. I was replying to someone who replied to you, and through the magic of Slashdot moderation and your preferences, my post came to look like it was just under yours instead of under the person who replied to you.
... my bad. Until recently I had been reading with a threashold of -1, now I've set it to 2.
... suddenly it all make sense. Sorry. :-)
Oops! You're right
Since we basically agreed on the point being made I was a little confused by the tone of your comment
I never said what you attributed to me. You've either taken someone elses statement out of context, or fabricated a blatent absurdity and attributed it to me. Either way it is an inaccurate characterization. What I said was:
However, your example does underscore how stupid the argument that copyright violation somehow equals theft is, as denying someone the money they "would have made" can be many things (e.g. good competition, frugality, a lack of desire for their product, good taste, etc. etc.), but theft it is not.
Your comments with respect to compensation being artificially tied to replication costs, and the obsolescence of our copyright laws given today's technology, is absolutely correct IMHO. Unfortunately, changes in the law are being made to support obsolete business models and cartels in a very luddite fashion, rather than modernizing the method whereby the creator (be s/he an automobile designer or a musician) is compensated to be more compatible with today's technologies.
Marriem-Webster is a member of the Copyright Cartels (they own copyrights on their dictionary, after all). They have as much a vested interest in promoting the kind of newspeak so many of the Copyright Barrons engage in. Now, as to whether the Cartel's terminology was imposed on the public first, then wandered into the "official" definition as presented by one of the Cartel's members, or was presented as part of such a definition early in the cycle, is a chicken-and-egg argument.
The fact remains that copyright violation has nothing whatsoever to do with stealing, or piracy for that matter, as the terms are understood by reasonably literate people, and certainly have nothing whatsoever to do with one another as far as the law is concerned.
Is it really all that surprising to you that IP Companies such as Merriem-Webster would insert their self serving, synthetic terminology into their "official" works? How better to control the public dialog than to control the very definitions used to communcate with, and redefine them over time to promote one's own agenda? Speaking of which, I just looked up the term "liberate" and did not find a single reference to the demolition of Vietnamese villages suspected of harboring Viet Cong (despite that "official," and later colloqual, usage of the term which goes back much farther than the notion of copyright violators somehow having traits in common with murder and pillage on the high seas does). Looks like Merriem-Webster is rather selective about what newspeak terms they let into their "official" definitions, and which ones they do not.
George Orwell was remarkably prophetic in his description of how language would be used to shape and ultimately control human thought. His only error was to assume such power would be wielded by governments, when in fact it is the Media Conglomerates (which include publishers and Marriam-Webster).
This is akin to saying "piracy = copyright violation because the Movie Industry says so!"
Dep ... Depp.
Amusing (Depp in German translates roughtly to "idiot"). Certainly apropos in this case.
I find it both amusing and profoundly irritating that Copyright Cartel Apologists continue to engage in their use of "newspeak" to promote their corporate agendas.
Copyright violation is not stealing. It is not theft. It is not piracy. It is copyright violation. Even a quick reading of the law, and of court decisions, makes this abundantly obvious to the most casual of observers. There is a reason for this, and I'll say it again (since there seem to be so many thick headed people who can't keep their terminology even remotely straight): copyright violation is not even remotely similiar to theft. Theft and stealing deny the victim the original product (it is "taken away" from the victim). If I steal a car, the owner will find themself walking (or hopping a cab) home after their visit to the local precinct to report the crime. If I replicate the car and drive off in the copy, the owner is denied nothing. Nor is the manufacturer. Yes, the manufacturer will scream that my unauthorized replication of the car has denied them much needed profits, profits based on a business model that predated widespread replicator use, but that is hardly theft. It is nothing more than sour grapes because their business model has become obsolete and they are either going to have to change those business models or look for another line of work.
Of course they will use their existing capital to buy legislation from congress to protect their business model, just as the existing Copyright Cartels have done now that widespread information replicators (read: computers) are in use. And of course our congress, which routinely sells itself to anyone with cash like cheap whores, will readily oblige.
That changes nothing. Copyright violation is indeed a crime (and a rather synthetic one at that), with its own definitions, and its own set of punishments (which don't really resemble the definitions or punishments of theft at all, much less piracy on the high seas). I'm sure that once nano technology allows widespread replication of material goods, providing the promise of prosperity for every human being on the planet, these same "intellectual" property laws will be used to keep the masses impoverished and beholden to an oligarchy of outdated corporations, exactly as they are doing to our artistic culture today.
Even then, by no rational defintion, will unauthorized replication be even remotely akin to theft, just as copyright violation has nothing whatsoever to do with stealing or piracy, except in the minds of those whose limited imaginations and limitless greed compell them to do all they can to keep the (western) world in a state of cultural impoverishment.
The biggest thing to hit in the follow-up brief would be to point out the logical inconsistencies in the DA/MPAA's arguments which Michael so clearly pointed out. The argument about how a DVD that eventually falls into the public domain will be accessed struck me as a particularly powerful one.
... again.
Indeed. There was an article some time ago linked to by slashdot, which described ongoing difficulties with preserving existing data and knowledge as storage media changes. It is a problem libraries, data wharehouses, companies, and even individuals have (how do you play those old 12" records when no more turntables are manufactured, or they have become so specialized and expensive as to be unobtainable by all but the most wealthy?). These problems have arisen without encryption, without any malicious efforts to make the data inaccessible. Quite the contrary, information is being lost over time already. How much worse will this become with the added barriars of encryption, against which even research is being suppressed, quite probably until it is too late.
Another issue touched upon in the article is the dubious notion that studios will make content available in an "unencrypted" form once their copyrights expire. Two facts point out the absurdity of this notion: (1) The movie studios have been aggressively extending copyrights in order to keep copyrighted material (including such icons of western culture as "Mickey Mouse") out of the public domain (cf. Sonny Bono Copyright Act) and (2) The studios have a history of destroying films once their copyrights have expired, rather than release the material into the public domain as their social contract, per the constitution, requires. Taken together these two facts, along with the DMCA, clearly shows the ugly situation we have gotten ourselves into, where historians, librarians, and other preservers of information are legally banned from doing their work until the material they wish to preserve has become inaccessible due to encryption which cannot legally be circumvented, and for which research is actively suppressed through legal thuggary, or has been destroyed altogether. The result? It is very likely that almost no cultural heritage from our time will be handed down to our grandchildren, except perhaps as a proprietary, commercial work for which the copyright has been extended to an even more outrageous duration
It is almost like we are going into another dark age, where knowledge is suppressed for financial gain, and ultimately lost.
We are not "heading into another dark age," we're already there. Many have argued for a long time that the cooperation between industry and academic instututions would undermine the independence of academia, and hence our entire intellectual foundation as a society. These dire predictions were being made in the 1980s when Reagan and his cronies gutted funding for our colleges and universities.
The result has been unambiguous: colleges and universities have turned more and more to private industry for funding, sacrificing their intellectual independence in the process. This example, where Xerox may likely have played the pivotol role in caving to the RIAA, is but one obvious example of what is happening over and over again on campuses everywhere.
Couple the erosion of our foundation of intellectual freedom by making our institutions financially beholden and in some cases even intertwined with corporate entities (which are easilly pressured by threats to revinue, licensing, and/or bad publicity) with laws which criminalize intellectual activities such as reverse engineering and certain applications of cryptographic mathematics and you have, by and large, successfully gutted independent thought in your society. The rest of the dominos will fall like clockwork, when and as they offend or run counter to the goals of those who set these destructive policies.
The "cranks" were right, and the foundation of our intellectual thought, and of dissent in general, are virtually gone.
Back in my mudding days (circa 1992) there was at least one rudimentary graphical mud. The resolution was terrible, the objects blocky, the color limited, but depending on how the patent is read it would probably constitute prior art. 3d is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. Does hitting ctrl-r and ctrl-l to turn left and right and displaying a still of the same room count? Certainly 3d, if not as finely tuned as, say, a Doom or Quake interface, but where does one draw the line? 90 degrees between frames, or 0.00001 degree? Communications and chatting between characters was certainly a major part of the game.
On what concerns the arguments about local police doing nothing against criminal hackers then I can state this is pure BS. In fact in every major Russian city there is now a special department called 'Direction "R"' that fights computer crimes. Maybe the guys are not as effective as FBI "bright minds". But still is amazing to see how FBI treats their colleagues.
... somehow I doubt it, as ex-KGB would never have been stupid enough to fall into the FBI's hands. I say this not to insult Russia but to point out a grim reality ... this sort of thing happens in the United States more than we like to admit, it is certainly plausible that it could happen in Russia as well.
Just when I'm about to give up on slashdot as a source of never ending, mindless drivel I find a gem like this, buried beneath the countless posts posturing and belaboring the obvious. I for one had no idea that Russian law enforcement was this involved in tracking down computer criminals (as my other rather provocative post in this thread demonstrates). This is the sort of thing we here in the west hear nothing about, and it colors our perceptions of Russia inappropriately as a result.
More interesting is that Chelyabinsk is one of the later military centers in Russia. So I believe that if police is sleeping there (Direction R is a police force) than the ex-KGB is surely not sleeping.
Unless, of course, it is ex-KGB freelancers that are engaged in these activities, with friends and contacts within the existing law enforcement structure running cover for them. I have no idea if that is the case for these two individuals
So I can take only one conclusion from FBI's actions: bravado.
That is almost certainly the case. It is also a political game -- they can trot out successes like this one come budget time and probably get more funding as a result.
What's next? SEALs landing in some Mokrovka village to catch a small group of teenagers playing a cracked Xbox?
No, but if you are native American, speaking out against the government in Washington, watch out!
Give the russian extortionists the electric chair and reprimand the FBI Agents for violating Russian law and possibly violating American law. Allow the agents to pay their fines out of the confiscated funds, the balance of which are to be used to fund further anti-cracking/extortion campaigns ...
...
Seriously, I wonder if Russians realize that their government's unwillingness or inability to persue these sorts of criminals makes them look to the rest of the world like a haven of corruption and crime. As appearances go: Chechnya is to Russia as Russia to the rest of the world
+5 insightful? Looks like the same Microsoft lackeys that rated my comment from +4 interesting to +5 funny (thereby prejuding readers against the content before they've read a single word) are out abusing the moderation system once again. Moderating up this kind of disinformation is disingenous, indeed downright disgusting.
As others have pointed out, Mandrake forked from red hat years ago and make significant contributions to numerous free software projects, not the least of which is providing an easy way for the rest of us to make financial contributions to the project of our choice without having to do a bunch of research first. This will probably translate into a sizable increase in contributions from people like myself with money to give, but not time to do the necessary digging to find out how.
Finally, Mandrake stands on its own, with its own unique and compelling features, not the least of which are its ease of installation and ease of use. I can give my aunt a copy of Mandrake 7.2 and she can install and use it with little or no help, unlike the copy of Windows ME she had.
Red Hat is a very nice distribution, and I wish them success. Likewise for Suse, Debian, and, yes, Mandrake.
The timestamps on the posts (assuming such are rigorously kept) should prove that the original post by you was made prior to the post you accuse of plagerism (please use correct terminology, piracy ... rape, theft, and murder on the high seas ... has nothing to do with what happened to you).
Given the availability of this evidence, rather then deleting the post, couldn't the slashdot editors reattribute the post (and karma) to the proven original author when such disputes arise. No content is changed, only attribution.
This kind of policy would have the dual effect of rewarding the original author for posting a very sound argument, while removing the incentive (whoring for karma) of plagerizing the posts of others. Most importantly, it would avoid removing a positive contribution to the discussion (in terms of the content, which deserves the +5 score even if the plagerist does not).
Anyone reading the plane English of this license cannot help but see that, very clearly, the end user is required to grant Microsoft any and every right to their ideas, their work, even their patents, just by processing their information through a piece of software which happens to use Passport as an authentication mechanism. This could, in the future, include any document written by Micosoft Word (using passport to authenticate the author or encrypt the file as a new feature, etc.), sent through a Microsoft mail server, or served from a Microsoft Web server.
Microsoft has a well documented history of stealing other peoples work (and getting sued for it, and being required by the court to make appropriate reparations to the aggrieved parties). This isnt about avoiding frivolous lawsuits, this is about legalizing a reprehensible tactic they already engage in: theft from their customers, their competitors, and anyone else whose idea they like.
There is, however, a silver lining to this dark cloud. Two states have already, very foolishly, passed UCITA legislation, giving this sort of EULA the force of law. One would hope the courts would overturn such an onerous condition, particularly in light of the fact that nearly every party to this agreement has no idea what theyve agreed to, but one cannot assume reason will always prevail.
If it doesnt, it wouldnt be too terribly difficult for the authors of Apache, sendmail, various USENET and chat servers, and so forth, to add a clause to their respective licenses reading something like this:
This would be a potent weapon indeed for the Free Software community to strike a possibly leathal blow to copyright and patent law, once and for all (until such a time as another court rethinks this kind of thing, or a law is passed making such onerous and unreasonable property grabs illegal). Much of the very infrastructure of the Internet is powered by free software of one sort or another. If the courts should uphold this kind of behavior, we as a Community are in a position to use it in liberating far more knowledge and intellectual property, doing the Copyright and Patent Barons far more damage (and correspondingly far more good for free science and free software) than they could ever do to us. We arent compelled to use their software, but if they are using the internet at all, they are almost certainly using ours.
You are correct, and I was a little fast and loose with my terminology. The MPAA is in a strategic alliance with the DVD Forum. Both are engaged in legal thuggary against the Free Software community, with the DVD Forum leading the charge.
While the Japanese Anime studios are not, in and of themselves, members of the MPAA (the MPAA is, after all, a consortium of American companies), they do pay royalties and fees to the DVD Forum to publish their material in that format, which fees do play a large part in financing the DVD Forum's attack on Free Software dvd players for Linux and other alternative OSes (including the arrest and detainment of a 15-year old Norwegian programmer).
I cannot comment on what, if any, Japanese media consortia Anime producers may be a part of, or what, if any, stance they take on Free Software, but I can unequivocably say that, every time you purchase a DVD with any kind of motion picture content on it you are in fact helping to finance a large and very potent attack against the Free Software community.
If you cannot forgo the immediate gratification of purchasing DVDs and similar consumer products despite the knowledge that doing so harms the very community you believe yourself to be a part of that is your perogative. However, it is disingenuous to use semantics to imply that purchasing a particular product (e.g. Anime DVDs) is not harmful to a particular movement (e.g. the Free Software movement), when in fact the opposite is true.
Generally speaking, the more intelligent your comments, the more whiny, intellectually challenged trolls you are likely to receive. Don't feed them, they revel in your attention. Ignore them, and watch years of their life get chewed away by their impotent rage ... a favor in that it shortens their empty, meaningless existence.
:-)
I for one thank you for your mirror. While the download to work (256k link) wasn't lightning fast, I did log into my home machine (21st Century) and do a wget that got the whole thing in less than 2 minutes. Hot Damn!
... if it is a slow news day I'd much rather have kernel 0.0.x releases announced than read some review of the latest anime release on DVD, the former which holds little interest for me and the latter which I have been actively boycotting for more than a year now (and I must say in light of the MPAA's implacable attack on Free Software authors and users over the last year, I find it profoundly depressing that a site which claims to be a forum for Free Software news and advocacy will, in effect, promote the products which help to finance such attacks, but that is a rant for another day).
... I would hope such stories would diminish about the time 2.4.11 is being released.
Which just goes to show there are numerous tastes and interests among slashdot readers, some of whome wait breathlessly for the next point release of any software.
More seriously, these announcements are I think more relevant early on in the new kernel cycle as more fundamental fixes are typically included
Point well taken. I wasn't trying to disprove anything, merely cite by example that learning a new skill as one grows older isn't a problem at all. As for it being easier to learn when young, that is true of some things (languages) at particularly early years (before six or eight years of age being the typical ages cited), but is certainly unproven for anything beyond that. For example, IFAIK it is unproven that learning German at 21 is easier than learning German would be at 31 or 41.
To answer your question, it is quite likely that my screenplays will suck far worse than the Matrix.
I am 36. I turn 37 in April. Birthdays don't necessarilly match year-end dates or OS anniversaries precisely. To clarify, I began playing with Linux early in 1992.