If Canada is so bad why do we have Blackberrys out here first and those Sprint PCS ads from Buffalo are hyping a product that's been out a long time in Canada. Not to mention a higher availabilty of cable and DSL lines.
Ask the original poster. I was referring to the difficulties of installing and maintaining a wireless infrastructure over vast tracts of land, vs. the relatively compact geography of the UK and Japan.
I doubt your SprintPCS is going to do you much good in the Northwest Territories, or in vast portions of northern Qeubec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, or British Columbia.
As for higher availability of DSL lines, do you have hard numbers to back up that allegation?
It wouldn't surprise me if it were true, as most of Canada's population is concentrated in relatively small corners of the country, but you don't really expect anyone to take your blanket assertions without some evidence to back them up, do you?
Libraries generally don't censor as such (by actively reviewing material for 'appropriateness'), they operate within budgets and prioritize their purchases based upon what they think their patrons and community want.
This is not the same as actively censoring all access to such material, nor is it even remotely the same as federally mandated censorship.
In addition, one can get nearly every book or magazine ever printed at your local library by making use of inter-library loans. This is where you go to the librarian, request a search for a book or document, and request that it (or a copy) be sent to your local library. It may take two or four weeks for the material to arrive, but arrive it will. So even if the local community library will not keep The Happy Hooker or Huckleberry Finn on their shelves, you can request it and, after a short wait, still pick up a copy there and read it.
Think of the internet as the world's most effecient inter-library loan system. This legislation wants to do something unprecendented: mandate exactly what libraries can and cannot share with one another, as well as what they can and cannot put on their shelves. And they want to do so at the least competent level of government: the federal level.
The UK kicks all of our ass in wireless technology/cool stuff to have. And I'm not even going to talk about Japan, that stuff makes me want to cry...
The UK and Japan are both much smaller geographically. The US is big, and Canada bigger still. In addition, Canada has far less people than the US, making the cost per person per square mile potentially much higher, and total geographical coverage unrealistic.
While I agree that the US government really dropped the ball by not imposing a standard at some point and we will (and are) paying the price (imposing standards and a level playing field for competition are two very legitimate uses of government regulation -- imagine if our railroads weren't of a standard gague, our highways didn't have standardized signs, our cars didn't have safety and emission standards, etc. etc.), it is geography more than "socialism" vs. "capitalism" that is at play here.
I sent an email to ABCNEWS asking them to ban him, but I doubt that will happen. I did point out the flaws in his arguements though. I haven't received a respounce as of the writing of this.
I wish you had considered your words more carefully. The word "ban" is loaded (and not what you are really trying to say) and using it effectively pushes everyone's buttons, especially in the media. It smacks of censorship.
What Mr. Moody has done is act in an unprofessional manner (by deliberately spreading misinformation). His lack of 2nd grade mathematical skills has demonstrated his lack of qualification to write about any technical subject. Not that it is necessary, as the arguments he uses and the conclusions he draws do this stunningly well also.
He should be fired for incompetence, or at least reassigned to a job more worthy of his skills, perhaps as a movie critic or janatorial assistant.
One thing is certain, by employing him as a technical writer (or pundit) ABC's reputation with respect to technical matters suffers tremendously.
He shouldn't be banned for writing whatever he wants, however, his employment should reflect the quality of his work, i.e. none.
VMWare doesn't negate the need for a windows licence to run windows software; you still need an OS (windows in this case) to run on your Virtual Machine.
True, but in that case you would need only one license per machine, not two.:-)
VMWare is an excellent tool for transitioning. The goal is of course to become totally windows free (which we have more or less achieved where I work). Some companies do not have that luxery.
Someone mentioned autocad, and cited retraining costs as the limiting factor. I suspect the libraries of autocad data that have been generated over the years is a much more limiting factor, but be that as it may, one application is holding them back on an aging, legacy system afflicted with rising costs and decreasing reliability. Such a firm could move much of their core business to Linux while retaining the one or two applications which keep them locked into an inferior platform by using VMWare (or Plex86 once it is ready).
What advantages does this have?
Stability. Ironicly, Windows 98/NT running under VMWare on Linux crashes less often than it does when running on pure hardware. Odd and counterintuitive, but true nonetheless.
Flexibility. Users get the best of both worlds, so to speak. Those apps which can get moved to Linux, those which can't are retained on windows running under an emulator.
Independence. Running one or two apps under Windows lessens the likelihood that one will be forced by Microsoft to upgrade. Those one or two legacy apps can run on the current version of windows indefinitely, while the core operating system (Linux) is upgraded as and when the firm sees fit.
Savings. Not being forced to upgrade on Microsoft's schedule results in tremendous savings in both time (man-hours spent on upgrades, testing, debugging) and money spent paying Microsoft's ever more inflated vigs. In addition, the management of N linux boxes requires significantly less time and effort (read: man hours and personnel) than an equivelent number of Windows boxes.
Even if you're stuck using VMWare indefinitely, you're still ahead to pay the $300 / box up front along with the windows license and move to Linux, thereby gaining control of your own upgrade cycles and costs (at a somewhat larger initial cost) than you are remaining with the status quo.
I mean, two licenses per machine? What is going to come out of Redmond next?
Actually, given Microsoft's defacto monopoly on the desktop, they may well have been coerced into signing such a contract. If so, this is a clear case of further abuse of their monopoly, and excellent fodder for the DOJ come appeals time.
Put more clearly, many businesses are locked in to the windows platform for various reasons. The cost of switching to Linux or FreeBSD and porting their apps may be something their budget won't allow, unless amortized over several years. It is also possible that they rely on a niche product (real estate listing software, legal assistance software, etc.) for which no Linux analog exists.
They take the lessor of all evils, pay Microsoft their inflated vig, and stay within budget for another year.
Yes, anyone can plainly see that, over the span of two or three years, they would be far ahead to switch to Linux and use VMWare to run what windows apps they cannot live without, but few managers are permitted to think in such long range terms.
If they're stupid enought to do business that way, they deserve to get reamed.
That much is true - if this doesn't wake upper management up, nothing will.
No, it isn't. It is an unfortunate fact that most of the homeless on the street today are victims of their own drug or alcohol abuse, or victims of the Reagan administration's callous and brutal program of closing down mental hospitals and chucking the marginal patients out onto the street, in a society where they were not equipped to make it.
Feeding someone's addiction by subsidizing it with money is irresponsible and destructive: you make the neighborhood more dangerous for those of us who live here, and you actively help to destroy the lives of those you purport to help.
All so you can look "kind and sensitive" to your date. Please, do us all a favor: stay the hell out of our cities and go back to the suburbs where you belong.
The fact is, modern capitalism (or corporatism, if you will) demands inequality, poverty and homelessness. There can be no "winners" without there being many more "losers".
I am not a particularly strong fan of capitalism and even less so of "corporatism" but this is complete nonesense. Your notion implies a zero sum game, where there is only so much pie, therefor some must go without. It has been known (and demonstrated) for centuries that no economic system that is producing (be it capitalism, communism, or whatever) is a zero some game. Wealth is being added to the pie. Having said that, I will agree there is plenty wrong with the lack of social net in the US.
The answer, however, is not to give spare change to the homeless. If you are at all serious about making a difference, donate time or money to local shelters, soup kitches, or charities. They do far more to help the homeless (and those close to becoming so) without subsidizing addictions and self-destructive behavior.
If you feel you must have some kind of personal, touchy-feely rapport with a homeless person to satisfy some internal guilt complex you harbour, may I suggest supporting those people who are selling homeless newspapers (in Chicago the paper "Streetwise" is sold for $1 each and is an interesting read). At least then you are helping someone to develope a work ethic and do something positive. The money may still be used to buy alcohol or drugs, but at least they've earned it.
The only way for the truly poor to survive is to beg.
Now, that comment has to be the most patronizing one I've ever heard. Talk about bigotry against the poor!
In addition, it is an utter crock of shit. I have travelled the world over, including many beautiful countries you and others would probably dub "third world." Many of the people in these places have even less than the homeless in America do. Yes, some beg, but most eck out an existence working in some fashion. There are other ways to survive, in poverty, than succumbing to drug or alcohol addiction and asking (or demanding) free handouts from clueless suburbanites who come downtown for a night out on the town.
Furthermore, there are many, many underfunded charities that actually do positive work to not only provide food and shelter for the needy, but also try to help them get back on their feet. Rather than using your money for a destructive purpose, why not donate to them instead? It may require a little more thought and research than simply handing a stranger a $20 to make yourself feel better, but it will also do a hell of a lot more good.
I personally think that this a patronizing, if understandable, attitude.
It may be a patronizing and politically incorrect attitude to you, but it is nonetheless correct. An addict will always feed their addiction first. Food, shelter, and the day to day business of survivial come in a distant second.
If you want to help, help the charities and organizations in the community that really are out there on the front lines making a difference, and stop being a part of the problem.
And because I take the attitude that I am not anyone's judge (and if they choose to buy a gallon of cheap vodka that's their business) I sometimes hand over a fifty, or a twenty, folded.
You are not helping a homeless person by subsidizing the kind of self-destructive behaviors which keep them down. In many cases, alcoholism and drug abuse are big contributors to destroying these peoples lives.
Worse still, you encourage them to bother the rest of us so they can get their next fix, and as one who lives in a neighborhood where I can't make it from my home to the corner White Hen without getting asked at least once for a handout, let me tell you, a lot of these folks are very aggressive in demanding your money (something they do not have a right to).
If you really care about their plight (and aren't just trying to impress the girl your with with your "sensitivity" or appeasing your own misplaced guilt), do what RMS did and go out and buy them a meal. Or better yet, give some big bucks to your local soup kitchen or shelter. These institutions are chronically underfunded and vital to supporting the homeless folks basic needs.
Loose change is probably one of the worst things you can give a homeless person: it seduces them into not trying to better themselves and blinds them to other possibilities, and it all too often subsidizes the very self-destructive habits which put them where they are to begin with.
Oh well, I better get back to the flamage over my first person account. I wanted to avoid the usual "RMS came here and said what he always says article", but I guess it didn't come off well.
Don't let the knee-jerk flames get you down, some people dislike RMS for various reasons (most of them probably having to do with the GNU/Linux silliness on the part of RMS, or silliness on their own part in hating anything to the left of Genghis Kahn, hating free software, or having been personaly miffed by his sometimes caustic remarks) and they'll take their personal ire out on anyone who dares make positive remarks about someone they have appointed as their nemesis.
I for one found the article to be a very enjoyable read, a refreshingly different view of an often one-sided topic.
However, I must ask what kind of sycophancy inspired this article? For God's sake timothy, you're spending time detailing on how to wine and dine Mr. Stallman?
I actually enjoyed this article. It showed us the human side of RMS (complete with some quirks most computer junkies can relate to), in a different context than most articles about RMS or the FSF do. Interviews are a dime a dozen -- this article showed a different and very interesting side of the man, while at the same time imparting useful and important information to others who may wish to have him visit in a professional capacity.
As one who had his email ignored (no complaint here, my question had to do with my Free Media License, which is tangental to RMSes mission, and he is a busy man) I was happy to read how much time he spends sifting through and answering his emails. Strike one misconception on my part.
RMS is probably as used to hero worship as he is to villification, and I doubt he reads any more into this article than I did: namely that the guy liked him, enjoyed meeting him, and had revised some of his opinions and preconceptions about him after getting to know him.
I saw nothing in the article to remotely justify your use of the word "sycophancy" or "brownie points."
When/. editors post something like this, it should be preceded with a warning: "get some ad-blocking software first not to generate eyeballs for the troll".
It shouldn't be too hard to hack together a link via a junkbuster proxy, such that anyone, with or without ad-busting software, could click on the link and read the story, sans advertising.
That would be the responsible thing for slashdot to do, but I doubt their employers would hear of it (legal liability fears would rule the nest, most likely).
surely that means that the light still travelled the same route across the surface, and therefore it is still looking millions of years into the past, and so still providing evidence against creationists?
[humor] Not fair. You used logic!
Don't you know you're supposed to have FAITH? [/humor]
These people are living in a state of complete denial despite mountains of physical evidence in front of them that the world is much older than their religion teaches them, that humans did indeed evolve from other (in light of such stupidity I cannot in good conscience say 'lower') life forms, and that the earth is, indeed, not the center of the universe.
You cannot expect a shred of rationality from such people, much less logic and critical thinking.
Out of curiosity though how would Biblical scholars explain Carbon dating/Rock layering as proof of a much older earth?
One common copout is to interpret the "six days" as "six phases" of indeterminent length.
In short, science has a habit of disproving core beliefs of most religions, islam and judeo-christianity in particular. The two common reactions are "denial" (the just unelected Kansas state school board's approach) and modification of belief ("days" now equal "phases of indeterminent length"), while still clinging to the defunct core belief.
I mean, these people still cling to the absurd notion that there is an intelligent creator of the universe. More silly still, they insist on the notion that such a creator, were he to exist, would give one flying fuck about individual human beings who would be virtually indistinguishable from bacteria from such a being's vantage point.
Such people truly will believe just about anything, which allows the Jim Jones and David Koreshes (not to mention the Reagans) of the earth to be so successful.
I'm not *trying* to be thickheaded about this, just tell me what the differences and advantages are.
The problem with the internet, and the world wide web built upon it, is that it can be censored. Servers can be identified and physically removed from the net, their owners punished or coerced into removing content. Ditto with web pages, ftp file stores, and email / mailing list servers.
On the other hand, USENET was less susceptible to this, as it was in many ways distributed, in a different form than freenet and with different goals, but distributed nonetheless. Information was copied and propogated throughout the net, multiple times and in many directions. Censoring a USENET article was difficult if not impossible, but, alas, the same is not true of the other internet services, in particular the web.
FreeNet is designed to insure anonymity by default (current anonymous remailers and the like are non-trivial to use, even for experienced users like myself. Not hard, once you know what you're doing, but non-trivial, and certainly a challenge if you're new to it). It is also designed to make it impossible for anyone to remove content of any kind, regardless of whether or not they have a gun to their head (metaphorically speaking).
It is an effort to bring the advantages of anonymouty and USENET-like distributed and replicated information to a broader class of internet services. There is even a web-freenet interface under development -- the goal being that one day even the world wide web, or a freenet variant, will be impossible to censor.
Hopefully, this will bring anonymity and freedom from fear to even the most casual user of the net, not just the technically savvy elite.
I'm not saying that there aren't cases, even including ones like this, where Freenet is very useful, I just think that the application being talked about isn't (for the majority of stuff shared) one of them.
There is a 50% chance we will have Tippor Gore as our next first lady. Can you say "War Against Music?" She has a history (as a senator's wife) of stirring up lynch mobs of mothers to try and censor music.
If dub-uh-yuh gets elected, don't count on an age of enlightenment either... he enjoys support from those who tried to run the Maplethorpe exhibit out of Cincinnati and imprison the Art Museum's curator.
The point being that both major parties have an appalling record when it comes to civil liberties and freedom of expression. FreeNet may well become the only place artists can distribute their work without the likes of Tippor and the Religious Right stirring up the modern day equivelent of a lynch mob against them.
That being the case, why not build a responsible system for reimbursing artists upon a solid infrastructure designed to make it impossible for their work to ever be censored by anyone, anywhere?
Many would define freedom as "The ability to do anything I want with the this piece of code", as you implied in your original post. [... ] In other words, I am not allowed to do what I want with the code, even if I make my own changes to it. People are NOT allowed to "use their data however they want", as you asserted.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Currently, copyright law allows something that the FSF and others consider to be wrong, namely allowing someone to put computer code under lock and key and claim ownership of it, depriving all others of any right to make use of, modify, or in many cases even look at the code in question.
The FSF's goal is to counter this. Unfortunately, because the law as it stands favors those who would restrict information, specifically source code to software, the FSF had to write guarantees into its license to protect the freedom of the code from those who would alter it and then hide their changes behind existing copyright laws.
The FSF's goal and philosophy call for a world in which all information is available to everybody under what amounts to BSD style conditions, but the current state of the law fosters and encourages a form of intellectual vulturism and predition that has forced their hand, namely to write specific protections into the license requiring others to behave in an ethical manner. The law should do this, but it doesn't, so the license must.
The BSD license, unfortunately, has no such protections.
I for one won't consider releasing my material under the FreeBSD license given the current legal climage. All software I write is under the GPL because it achieves what I want, the guarantee that anyone can use my code for whatever purpose they want, as long as they share it with the rest of us.
I have written a Free Media License which does the same thing for other media (photographs, movies, movie scripts, music, etc.). Anyone can use my material, as long as they release the derivative product under the same, emmenently fair, conditions. What I do not want is some hollywood mogul using my stuff to make a movie, then turning around and suing me when I use DeCSS to decrypt the resulting DVD and watch it on my Linux box. As the GPL does for software, so my license does for media: namely protects the rights of everyone, at the expense of not permitting predators to take our work and make it their own, with the full force of government regulation and the gun to back them up.
FreeBSD is appropriate for some things, but there are a whole hell of a lot of projects for which it is singularly inappropriate (ditto for any other license you can name, including the GPL).
To summarize: the BSD license represents an ideal of where most of us want to be one day, but as long as the law is stacked so heavilly against freedom of information, the GPL is what is needed to get there.
Well, copyright is AFAIK the only form of speech control explicitly permitted by the constitution, with the requirement that it be an incentive to artists to create material.
Unfortunately, this is different than trying to restrain speech for national security interests, which has more than once been ruled unconstitutional (remember the Pentagon Papers, anyone?).
The Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act was, based upon those constitutional requirements, clearly unconstitutional even to the most casual observer. Unfortunately, the courts upheld that law. There is a possibility the courts will rule parts of the DMCA unconstitutional, but no guarantee. If not, this kind of speech can and will be restricted in the future, just as you are restricted from reprinting and selling a written work in some other format (Reader's Digest lost such a suit when reprinting substantial portions of novels).
Copyright is the greatest threat to free speech there is, in no small part because the constitution explicitly permits its existence (other restrictions on speech, such as trademark, aren't explicitly spelled out and are correspondingly weaker).
Imagine if the Pentagon had been able to suppress the pentagon papers based on copyright. Hell, that could be applied to any leaked document. All of a sudden every investigative reporter is completely hemmed in by copyright law and can acquire no evidence of wrongdoing without violating copyright. This is the direction copyright law has taken and is taking, and there is the possibility that the constitutionality of this may actually be upheld!
I will say it again. Copyright is the single greatest threat to free speech that currently exists. We should be seriously reevaluating the appropriateness of its existence in a free society.
I can see the conversation with a sales clerk: "Oh, you want me to buy the more expensive model which sounds the same, but is a complete pain in the ass to use. I hope you don't mind if I just buy the CD player"
You are largely correct, unless of course the music industry pulls an MPAA and effectively subsidizes the new format/technology by offering at or below cost to customers, as you alude to. But I think the scenerio may go a little differently.
There's a reason DVD is so cheap compared to laser disks, despite being newer (and in many ways better): it has built in access control (CSS) the studios love, and you can't record on it. The industry would like nothing better than to see VCRs disappear or become crippled (e.g. Tivo -- how many people do you know with libraries of tivo recordings? Zero, because there is no data persistence at all), and one big step in that direction is to offer a non-recordable format with superior sound and picture and get everyone excited about it.
If the RIAA were to do something similar (say, sell CDs for $18 each, while Audio-DVDs with draconian access controls BUT superior audio quality are selling for $8 each), people might well flock to the new medium.
Granted, this won't work for SDMI (initially), but the strategy would be to depricate unencrypted CDs in favor of DVDs (in much the same way vinyl was depricated), then leverage the DMCA to make all non-approved digital formats (e.g. mp3, ogg) effectively illegal, as ripping music to those formats would be "circumventing a copy protection scheme."
Lo and behold, suddenly the only music is on access-restricted DVDs you can only play in your consumer DVD player or Windoze box, or in pay-per-hear SDMI format... equally if not more restricted.
Hopefully the customer won't stand for this sort of thing, but this is exactly what I would expect the recording industry to try, and I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the possibility that they might actually succeed in doing so.
I think the napster/mp3 thing is a short term battle for them -- they aren't ready to ditch CDs yet (we can thank the DeCSS authors for that), and this delay has probably thrown what digital strategy they did have into some disarray. Hopefully we as consumers will keep in in disarray, forever.
Maybe the same thing applies that Piers Anthony said about writer's block: "If you have it, you're not being professional enough".
And the quality of his work reflects this philosophy. Stories written with what amounts to stream of consciousness (but lacking even that artistic quality), places where he writes himeself into a corner, and rather than go back and make the appropriate changes to the storyline, add some foreshadowing, etc., he plows ahead, writing a sentance of the form "fortunately, W had prepared for this weeks earlier by doing X, so now he did Y and escaped!"
The worst writing, bar none, I have ever seen in any genre (and in any universe).
And I don't think that fair use clause includes redistribution of music, only recording for personal use.
The law does not say personal use in its fair use clause, it says non-commercial use. There is a critical difference, as non-commercial use does allow things like tape trading among fans, etc. Clearly, swapping digital music as is done on napster would fall into this same non-commercial usage. It would be a severe stretch to say that fair use applies to one medium and not another, a stretch which I do not think the courts will, in appeals, be able to uphold.
This may not get napster off the hook (they are, after all, a commercial venture) but it does get the end users off the hook, as well as distributed architectures such as gnutella and freenet.
In germany, you can get your hans.schnitzel34@epost.de
That's not really any different than a lot of people's email addresses, in which the user has decided to have it reflect their real name. Better persistence, perhaps, if one assumes that the Post Office will be around longer than hotmail (not necessarilly a correct assumption - many companies have outlived goverments, especially in Europe), but not fundamentally different (or threatening).
However, having something like
hans.schnitzel_Herbertstrasse_23_Koeln@post.de
would be more worrying -- now any casually observing pyscho can hunt you down and delete you from the physical world. At least as things stand now finding someone in physical space requires some effort.
CNNs lack of journalistic ethics contrast to MSNBC
on
Napster Ruling Stayed
·
· Score: 2
The Differences between the MSNBC article and the CNN article are astounding.
I've never been a fan of MSNBC, but they at least mention that there is a question of the appropriateness of the injunction, and the fact that tens of thousands of fans are threatening boycott of the RIAA.
The CNN article, on the other hand, only mentions that the injunction was stayed, and then spends the rest of the article in effect decrying napster and spouting the RIAA party line. Journalism so yellow my urine looks pale in comparison.
If I were a journalist at CNN (and some of the other news sources that so distort the story and hide the "other side" from their readership/viewership altogethre), I would be deeply ashamed.
As it is, I am going to engage in my fair use right, as affirmed by the court of appeals today, to use napster to space shift some more music I own on old vinyl to my hard drive for more convinient listening.
Until recently there was a very controversial and public web site, crytome available which offered a unique and interesting look inside the world of espionage. Of course, by placing under the public eye so much information they made enemies of the FBI, the CIA, and various foreign intelligence agencies.
Do you know what happened to this site, and to your knowledge was your agency (or any of the other aforementioned agencies) involved in its apparent disappearance from the net?
Slashdot Mirror
If Canada is so bad why do we have Blackberrys out here first and those Sprint PCS ads from Buffalo are hyping a product that's been out a long time in Canada. Not to mention a higher availabilty of cable and DSL lines.
Ask the original poster. I was referring to the difficulties of installing and maintaining a wireless infrastructure over vast tracts of land, vs. the relatively compact geography of the UK and Japan.
I doubt your SprintPCS is going to do you much good in the Northwest Territories, or in vast portions of northern Qeubec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, or British Columbia.
As for higher availability of DSL lines, do you have hard numbers to back up that allegation?
It wouldn't surprise me if it were true, as most of Canada's population is concentrated in relatively small corners of the country, but you don't really expect anyone to take your blanket assertions without some evidence to back them up, do you?
Libraries generally don't censor as such (by actively reviewing material for 'appropriateness'), they operate within budgets and prioritize their purchases based upon what they think their patrons and community want.
This is not the same as actively censoring all access to such material, nor is it even remotely the same as federally mandated censorship.
In addition, one can get nearly every book or magazine ever printed at your local library by making use of inter-library loans. This is where you go to the librarian, request a search for a book or document, and request that it (or a copy) be sent to your local library. It may take two or four weeks for the material to arrive, but arrive it will. So even if the local community library will not keep The Happy Hooker or Huckleberry Finn on their shelves, you can request it and, after a short wait, still pick up a copy there and read it.
Think of the internet as the world's most effecient inter-library loan system. This legislation wants to do something unprecendented: mandate exactly what libraries can and cannot share with one another, as well as what they can and cannot put on their shelves. And they want to do so at the least competent level of government: the federal level.
The UK kicks all of our ass in wireless technology/cool stuff to have. And I'm not even going to talk about Japan, that stuff makes me want to cry...
The UK and Japan are both much smaller geographically. The US is big, and Canada bigger still. In addition, Canada has far less people than the US, making the cost per person per square mile potentially much higher, and total geographical coverage unrealistic.
While I agree that the US government really dropped the ball by not imposing a standard at some point and we will (and are) paying the price (imposing standards and a level playing field for competition are two very legitimate uses of government regulation -- imagine if our railroads weren't of a standard gague, our highways didn't have standardized signs, our cars didn't have safety and emission standards, etc. etc.), it is geography more than "socialism" vs. "capitalism" that is at play here.
I sent an email to ABCNEWS asking them to ban him, but I doubt that will happen. I did point out the flaws in his arguements though. I haven't received a respounce as of the writing of this.
I wish you had considered your words more carefully. The word "ban" is loaded (and not what you are really trying to say) and using it effectively pushes everyone's buttons, especially in the media. It smacks of censorship.
What Mr. Moody has done is act in an unprofessional manner (by deliberately spreading misinformation). His lack of 2nd grade mathematical skills has demonstrated his lack of qualification to write about any technical subject. Not that it is necessary, as the arguments he uses and the conclusions he draws do this stunningly well also.
He should be fired for incompetence, or at least reassigned to a job more worthy of his skills, perhaps as a movie critic or janatorial assistant.
One thing is certain, by employing him as a technical writer (or pundit) ABC's reputation with respect to technical matters suffers tremendously.
He shouldn't be banned for writing whatever he wants, however, his employment should reflect the quality of his work, i.e. none.
True, but in that case you would need only one license per machine, not two.
VMWare is an excellent tool for transitioning. The goal is of course to become totally windows free (which we have more or less achieved where I work). Some companies do not have that luxery.
Someone mentioned autocad, and cited retraining costs as the limiting factor. I suspect the libraries of autocad data that have been generated over the years is a much more limiting factor, but be that as it may, one application is holding them back on an aging, legacy system afflicted with rising costs and decreasing reliability. Such a firm could move much of their core business to Linux while retaining the one or two applications which keep them locked into an inferior platform by using VMWare (or Plex86 once it is ready).
What advantages does this have?
Even if you're stuck using VMWare indefinitely, you're still ahead to pay the $300 / box up front along with the windows license and move to Linux, thereby gaining control of your own upgrade cycles and costs (at a somewhat larger initial cost) than you are remaining with the status quo.
I mean, two licenses per machine? What is going to come out of Redmond next?
No One Forced Them To Sign The Contracts
Actually, given Microsoft's defacto monopoly on the desktop, they may well have been coerced into signing such a contract. If so, this is a clear case of further abuse of their monopoly, and excellent fodder for the DOJ come appeals time.
Put more clearly, many businesses are locked in to the windows platform for various reasons. The cost of switching to Linux or FreeBSD and porting their apps may be something their budget won't allow, unless amortized over several years. It is also possible that they rely on a niche product (real estate listing software, legal assistance software, etc.) for which no Linux analog exists.
They take the lessor of all evils, pay Microsoft their inflated vig, and stay within budget for another year.
Yes, anyone can plainly see that, over the span of two or three years, they would be far ahead to switch to Linux and use VMWare to run what windows apps they cannot live without, but few managers are permitted to think in such long range terms.
If they're stupid enought to do business that way, they deserve to get reamed.
That much is true - if this doesn't wake upper management up, nothing will.
This is a callous and brutal attitude.
No, it isn't. It is an unfortunate fact that most of the homeless on the street today are victims of their own drug or alcohol abuse, or victims of the Reagan administration's callous and brutal program of closing down mental hospitals and chucking the marginal patients out onto the street, in a society where they were not equipped to make it.
Feeding someone's addiction by subsidizing it with money is irresponsible and destructive: you make the neighborhood more dangerous for those of us who live here, and you actively help to destroy the lives of those you purport to help.
All so you can look "kind and sensitive" to your date. Please, do us all a favor: stay the hell out of our cities and go back to the suburbs where you belong.
The fact is, modern capitalism (or corporatism, if you will) demands inequality, poverty and homelessness. There can be no "winners" without there being many more "losers".
I am not a particularly strong fan of capitalism and even less so of "corporatism" but this is complete nonesense. Your notion implies a zero sum game, where there is only so much pie, therefor some must go without. It has been known (and demonstrated) for centuries that no economic system that is producing (be it capitalism, communism, or whatever) is a zero some game. Wealth is being added to the pie. Having said that, I will agree there is plenty wrong with the lack of social net in the US.
The answer, however, is not to give spare change to the homeless. If you are at all serious about making a difference, donate time or money to local shelters, soup kitches, or charities. They do far more to help the homeless (and those close to becoming so) without subsidizing addictions and self-destructive behavior.
If you feel you must have some kind of personal, touchy-feely rapport with a homeless person to satisfy some internal guilt complex you harbour, may I suggest supporting those people who are selling homeless newspapers (in Chicago the paper "Streetwise" is sold for $1 each and is an interesting read). At least then you are helping someone to develope a work ethic and do something positive. The money may still be used to buy alcohol or drugs, but at least they've earned it.
The only way for the truly poor to survive is to beg.
Now, that comment has to be the most patronizing one I've ever heard. Talk about bigotry against the poor!
In addition, it is an utter crock of shit. I have travelled the world over, including many beautiful countries you and others would probably dub "third world." Many of the people in these places have even less than the homeless in America do. Yes, some beg, but most eck out an existence working in some fashion. There are other ways to survive, in poverty, than succumbing to drug or alcohol addiction and asking (or demanding) free handouts from clueless suburbanites who come downtown for a night out on the town.
Furthermore, there are many, many underfunded charities that actually do positive work to not only provide food and shelter for the needy, but also try to help them get back on their feet. Rather than using your money for a destructive purpose, why not donate to them instead? It may require a little more thought and research than simply handing a stranger a $20 to make yourself feel better, but it will also do a hell of a lot more good.
I personally think that this a patronizing, if understandable, attitude.
It may be a patronizing and politically incorrect attitude to you, but it is nonetheless correct. An addict will always feed their addiction first. Food, shelter, and the day to day business of survivial come in a distant second.
If you want to help, help the charities and organizations in the community that really are out there on the front lines making a difference, and stop being a part of the problem.
Exactly right.
s tupid-fucking-banking-piece-of-shit-closed -source-worthless-fucking-product-that-can-only-ma ke-money-by-terrorizing-german-users-of- free-software.
Rename the "German Release" of Samba to:
In-germany-this-is-freeware-SMB-not-samba-that-
Call it "Samba" for short.
And because I take the attitude that I am not anyone's judge (and if they choose to buy a gallon of cheap vodka that's their business) I sometimes hand over a fifty, or a twenty, folded.
You are not helping a homeless person by subsidizing the kind of self-destructive behaviors which keep them down. In many cases, alcoholism and drug abuse are big contributors to destroying these peoples lives.
Worse still, you encourage them to bother the rest of us so they can get their next fix, and as one who lives in a neighborhood where I can't make it from my home to the corner White Hen without getting asked at least once for a handout, let me tell you, a lot of these folks are very aggressive in demanding your money (something they do not have a right to).
If you really care about their plight (and aren't just trying to impress the girl your with with your "sensitivity" or appeasing your own misplaced guilt), do what RMS did and go out and buy them a meal. Or better yet, give some big bucks to your local soup kitchen or shelter. These institutions are chronically underfunded and vital to supporting the homeless folks basic needs.
Loose change is probably one of the worst things you can give a homeless person: it seduces them into not trying to better themselves and blinds them to other possibilities, and it all too often subsidizes the very self-destructive habits which put them where they are to begin with.
Oh well, I better get back to the flamage over my first person account. I wanted to avoid the usual "RMS came here and said what he always says article", but I guess it didn't come off well.
Don't let the knee-jerk flames get you down, some people dislike RMS for various reasons (most of them probably having to do with the GNU/Linux silliness on the part of RMS, or silliness on their own part in hating anything to the left of Genghis Kahn, hating free software, or having been personaly miffed by his sometimes caustic remarks) and they'll take their personal ire out on anyone who dares make positive remarks about someone they have appointed as their nemesis.
I for one found the article to be a very enjoyable read, a refreshingly different view of an often one-sided topic.
However, I must ask what kind of sycophancy inspired this article? For God's sake timothy, you're spending time detailing on how to wine and dine Mr. Stallman?
I actually enjoyed this article. It showed us the human side of RMS (complete with some quirks most computer junkies can relate to), in a different context than most articles about RMS or the FSF do. Interviews are a dime a dozen -- this article showed a different and very interesting side of the man, while at the same time imparting useful and important information to others who may wish to have him visit in a professional capacity.
As one who had his email ignored (no complaint here, my question had to do with my Free Media License, which is tangental to RMSes mission, and he is a busy man) I was happy to read how much time he spends sifting through and answering his emails. Strike one misconception on my part.
RMS is probably as used to hero worship as he is to villification, and I doubt he reads any more into this article than I did: namely that the guy liked him, enjoyed meeting him, and had revised some of his opinions and preconceptions about him after getting to know him.
I saw nothing in the article to remotely justify your use of the word "sycophancy" or "brownie points."
When /. editors post something like this, it should be preceded with a warning: "get some ad-blocking software first not to generate eyeballs for the troll".
It shouldn't be too hard to hack together a link via a junkbuster proxy, such that anyone, with or without ad-busting software, could click on the link and read the story, sans advertising.
That would be the responsible thing for slashdot to do, but I doubt their employers would hear of it (legal liability fears would rule the nest, most likely).
surely that means that the light still travelled the same route across the surface, and therefore it is still looking millions of years into the past, and so still providing evidence against creationists?
[humor]
Not fair. You used logic!
Don't you know you're supposed to have FAITH?
[/humor]
These people are living in a state of complete denial despite mountains of physical evidence in front of them that the world is much older than their religion teaches them, that humans did indeed evolve from other (in light of such stupidity I cannot in good conscience say 'lower') life forms, and that the earth is, indeed, not the center of the universe.
You cannot expect a shred of rationality from such people, much less logic and critical thinking.
Out of curiosity though how would Biblical scholars explain Carbon dating/Rock layering as proof of a much older earth?
One common copout is to interpret the "six days" as "six phases" of indeterminent length.
In short, science has a habit of disproving core beliefs of most religions, islam and judeo-christianity in particular. The two common reactions are "denial" (the just unelected Kansas state school board's approach) and modification of belief ("days" now equal "phases of indeterminent length"), while still clinging to the defunct core belief.
I mean, these people still cling to the absurd notion that there is an intelligent creator of the universe. More silly still, they insist on the notion that such a creator, were he to exist, would give one flying fuck about individual human beings who would be virtually indistinguishable from bacteria from such a being's vantage point.
Such people truly will believe just about anything, which allows the Jim Jones and David Koreshes (not to mention the Reagans) of the earth to be so successful.
I'm not *trying* to be thickheaded about this, just tell me what the differences and advantages are.
The problem with the internet, and the world wide web built upon it, is that it can be censored. Servers can be identified and physically removed from the net, their owners punished or coerced into removing content. Ditto with web pages, ftp file stores, and email / mailing list servers.
On the other hand, USENET was less susceptible to this, as it was in many ways distributed, in a different form than freenet and with different goals, but distributed nonetheless. Information was copied and propogated throughout the net, multiple times and in many directions. Censoring a USENET article was difficult if not impossible, but, alas, the same is not true of the other internet services, in particular the web.
FreeNet is designed to insure anonymity by default (current anonymous remailers and the like are non-trivial to use, even for experienced users like myself. Not hard, once you know what you're doing, but non-trivial, and certainly a challenge if you're new to it). It is also designed to make it impossible for anyone to remove content of any kind, regardless of whether or not they have a gun to their head (metaphorically speaking).
It is an effort to bring the advantages of anonymouty and USENET-like distributed and replicated information to a broader class of internet services. There is even a web-freenet interface under development -- the goal being that one day even the world wide web, or a freenet variant, will be impossible to censor.
Hopefully, this will bring anonymity and freedom from fear to even the most casual user of the net, not just the technically savvy elite.
I'm not saying that there aren't cases, even including ones like this, where Freenet is very useful, I just think that the application being talked about isn't (for the majority of stuff shared) one of them.
... he enjoys support from those who tried to run the Maplethorpe exhibit out of Cincinnati and imprison the Art Museum's curator.
There is a 50% chance we will have Tippor Gore as our next first lady. Can you say "War Against Music?" She has a history (as a senator's wife) of stirring up lynch mobs of mothers to try and censor music.
If dub-uh-yuh gets elected, don't count on an age of enlightenment either
The point being that both major parties have an appalling record when it comes to civil liberties and freedom of expression. FreeNet may well become the only place artists can distribute their work without the likes of Tippor and the Religious Right stirring up the modern day equivelent of a lynch mob against them.
That being the case, why not build a responsible system for reimbursing artists upon a solid infrastructure designed to make it impossible for their work to ever be censored by anyone, anywhere?
Many would define freedom as "The ability to do anything I want with the this piece of code", as you implied in your original post. [ ... ] In other words, I am not allowed to do what I want with the code, even if I make my own changes to it. People are NOT allowed to "use their data however they want", as you asserted.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Currently, copyright law allows something that the FSF and others consider to be wrong, namely allowing someone to put computer code under lock and key and claim ownership of it, depriving all others of any right to make use of, modify, or in many cases even look at the code in question.
The FSF's goal is to counter this. Unfortunately, because the law as it stands favors those who would restrict information, specifically source code to software, the FSF had to write guarantees into its license to protect the freedom of the code from those who would alter it and then hide their changes behind existing copyright laws.
The FSF's goal and philosophy call for a world in which all information is available to everybody under what amounts to BSD style conditions, but the current state of the law fosters and encourages a form of intellectual vulturism and predition that has forced their hand, namely to write specific protections into the license requiring others to behave in an ethical manner. The law should do this, but it doesn't, so the license must.
The BSD license, unfortunately, has no such protections.
I for one won't consider releasing my material under the FreeBSD license given the current legal climage. All software I write is under the GPL because it achieves what I want, the guarantee that anyone can use my code for whatever purpose they want, as long as they share it with the rest of us.
I have written a Free Media License which does the same thing for other media (photographs, movies, movie scripts, music, etc.). Anyone can use my material, as long as they release the derivative product under the same, emmenently fair, conditions. What I do not want is some hollywood mogul using my stuff to make a movie, then turning around and suing me when I use DeCSS to decrypt the resulting DVD and watch it on my Linux box. As the GPL does for software, so my license does for media: namely protects the rights of everyone, at the expense of not permitting predators to take our work and make it their own, with the full force of government regulation and the gun to back them up.
FreeBSD is appropriate for some things, but there are a whole hell of a lot of projects for which it is singularly inappropriate (ditto for any other license you can name, including the GPL).
To summarize: the BSD license represents an ideal of where most of us want to be one day, but as long as the law is stacked so heavilly against freedom of information, the GPL is what is needed to get there.
The GPL is a means to an end, not the end itself.
Well, copyright is AFAIK the only form of speech control explicitly permitted by the constitution, with the requirement that it be an incentive to artists to create material.
Unfortunately, this is different than trying to restrain speech for national security interests, which has more than once been ruled unconstitutional (remember the Pentagon Papers, anyone?).
The Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act was, based upon those constitutional requirements, clearly unconstitutional even to the most casual observer. Unfortunately, the courts upheld that law. There is a possibility the courts will rule parts of the DMCA unconstitutional, but no guarantee. If not, this kind of speech can and will be restricted in the future, just as you are restricted from reprinting and selling a written work in some other format (Reader's Digest lost such a suit when reprinting substantial portions of novels).
Copyright is the greatest threat to free speech there is, in no small part because the constitution explicitly permits its existence (other restrictions on speech, such as trademark, aren't explicitly spelled out and are correspondingly weaker).
Imagine if the Pentagon had been able to suppress the pentagon papers based on copyright. Hell, that could be applied to any leaked document. All of a sudden every investigative reporter is completely hemmed in by copyright law and can acquire no evidence of wrongdoing without violating copyright. This is the direction copyright law has taken and is taking, and there is the possibility that the constitutionality of this may actually be upheld!
I will say it again. Copyright is the single greatest threat to free speech that currently exists. We should be seriously reevaluating the appropriateness of its existence in a free society.
I can see the conversation with a sales clerk: "Oh, you want me to buy the more expensive model which sounds the same, but is a complete pain in the ass to use. I hope you don't mind if I just buy the CD player"
... equally if not more restricted.
You are largely correct, unless of course the music industry pulls an MPAA and effectively subsidizes the new format/technology by offering at or below cost to customers, as you alude to. But I think the scenerio may go a little differently.
There's a reason DVD is so cheap compared to laser disks, despite being newer (and in many ways better): it has built in access control (CSS) the studios love, and you can't record on it. The industry would like nothing better than to see VCRs disappear or become crippled (e.g. Tivo -- how many people do you know with libraries of tivo recordings? Zero, because there is no data persistence at all), and one big step in that direction is to offer a non-recordable format with superior sound and picture and get everyone excited about it.
If the RIAA were to do something similar (say, sell CDs for $18 each, while Audio-DVDs with draconian access controls BUT superior audio quality are selling for $8 each), people might well flock to the new medium.
Granted, this won't work for SDMI (initially), but the strategy would be to depricate unencrypted CDs in favor of DVDs (in much the same way vinyl was depricated), then leverage the DMCA to make all non-approved digital formats (e.g. mp3, ogg) effectively illegal, as ripping music to those formats would be "circumventing a copy protection scheme."
Lo and behold, suddenly the only music is on access-restricted DVDs you can only play in your consumer DVD player or Windoze box, or in pay-per-hear SDMI format
Hopefully the customer won't stand for this sort of thing, but this is exactly what I would expect the recording industry to try, and I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the possibility that they might actually succeed in doing so.
I think the napster/mp3 thing is a short term battle for them -- they aren't ready to ditch CDs yet (we can thank the DeCSS authors for that), and this delay has probably thrown what digital strategy they did have into some disarray. Hopefully we as consumers will keep in in disarray, forever.
Maybe the same thing applies that Piers Anthony said about writer's block: "If you have it, you're not being professional enough".
And the quality of his work reflects this philosophy. Stories written with what amounts to stream of consciousness (but lacking even that artistic quality), places where he writes himeself into a corner, and rather than go back and make the appropriate changes to the storyline, add some foreshadowing, etc., he plows ahead, writing a sentance of the form "fortunately, W had prepared for this weeks earlier by doing X, so now he did Y and escaped!"
The worst writing, bar none, I have ever seen in any genre (and in any universe).
And I don't think that fair use clause includes redistribution of music, only recording for personal use.
The law does not say personal use in its fair use clause, it says non-commercial use. There is a critical difference, as non-commercial use does allow things like tape trading among fans, etc. Clearly, swapping digital music as is done on napster would fall into this same non-commercial usage. It would be a severe stretch to say that fair use applies to one medium and not another, a stretch which I do not think the courts will, in appeals, be able to uphold.
This may not get napster off the hook (they are, after all, a commercial venture) but it does get the end users off the hook, as well as distributed architectures such as gnutella and freenet.
In germany, you can get your hans.schnitzel34@epost.de
That's not really any different than a lot of people's email addresses, in which the user has decided to have it reflect their real name. Better persistence, perhaps, if one assumes that the Post Office will be around longer than hotmail (not necessarilly a correct assumption - many companies have outlived goverments, especially in Europe), but not fundamentally different (or threatening).
However, having something like
hans.schnitzel_Herbertstrasse_23_Koeln@post.de
would be more worrying -- now any casually observing pyscho can hunt you down and delete you from the physical world. At least as things stand now finding someone in physical space requires some effort.
The Differences between the MSNBC article and the CNN article are astounding.
I've never been a fan of MSNBC, but they at least mention that there is a question of the appropriateness of the injunction, and the fact that tens of thousands of fans are threatening boycott of the RIAA.
The CNN article, on the other hand, only mentions that the injunction was stayed, and then spends the rest of the article in effect decrying napster and spouting the RIAA party line. Journalism so yellow my urine looks pale in comparison.
If I were a journalist at CNN (and some of the other news sources that so distort the story and hide the "other side" from their readership/viewership altogethre), I would be deeply ashamed.
As it is, I am going to engage in my fair use right, as affirmed by the court of appeals today, to use napster to space shift some more music I own on old vinyl to my hard drive for more convinient listening.
Eat your heart out, RIAA.
Until recently there was a very controversial and public web site, crytome available which offered a unique and interesting look inside the world of espionage. Of course, by placing under the public eye so much information they made enemies of the FBI, the CIA, and various foreign intelligence agencies.
Do you know what happened to this site, and to your knowledge was your agency (or any of the other aforementioned agencies) involved in its apparent disappearance from the net?
'Course, now all I can do is shop online....
Which is precisely what Corporate America and its underpaid lackey, the U.S. Government, want.