Yes, this stinks out loud. This kind of thing was less blatant with other commercial OS like OS/2 but that was eventually proved. There's no need for proof this time.
You can't do business in the US because there is no free press there. It's the Napster case all over again and the courts have learned nothing in the last decade. Their lust to protect what they perceive as a big US business interest has them reaching these absurd rulings for tenuous secondary encouragement of copyright infringement. The fact that it's impossible for anyone to tell who "owns" a digital file is reason to rethink copyright not destroy people's ability to share things they have every right to share. Decisions like this will leave the US a broadcast backwater in a world that's bursting with free culture.
A five year prison term might be preferable to experiences like this, especially when ratting out the FBI can save hundreds of thousands of innocent people from further constitutional abuse. I can not demand heroic action by others but I wish there had were more than three in the hundreds of thousands of abused citizens so far. Innocent people going to jail for protecting privacy of other innocent people would shut this monster program down fast.
Vote for anyone but Republicans in 2008 and vote out everyone who had anything to do with the poorly named Patriot act.
Political opposition can be tracked easily - cctv is a success and that's why cities in the US are installing traffic cameras as fast as the feds can pay for it.
Your tax money should not be spent tracking political opposition with cameras. You might not be someone like that but you benefit from their work in the same you benefit from newspapers but have no intention of exercising your free speech.
Orwell's dystopia was hardest on office workers. Of course everyone suffered grinding poverty, ignorance, cruelty and lack of freedom but only the more educated members of the state knew better. Anyone from the working class that did notice would be drafted into the continuous and intentionally wasteful war of the day. Office workers lived under a constant purge. The nastiest part about a real dystopia is that people believe with all of their might, effort and 2 minutes hate that nothing could be better. "Ordinary" life goes on for the vast majority.
Things are not that bad yet but the apparatus is incomplete. Journalist and bloggers are harassed for their opinions today. With just a little less freedom, as in Russia, they will be murdered. The US NeoCons are building red light cameras in the US and praying for another false flag operation like 9/11. They already have ChoicePoint and other databases to track opposition but they don't quite have public support for it or more. Free flowing information on the internet has prevented that, so look for broadcast media to become more insane and more to be done to kill the internet.
GFS looks like it does most of what ZFS is supposed to do. There is no hubris in hoping that the nicer parts of ZFS are not patent encumbered - the hubris is in software patents and people who think they can own ideas. If there are no patents in the way, those better ideas will make their way into free file systems.
Free software works with hardware people already own, Vista does not. Microsoft might be able to scrape five computers together that run Vista but it won't match free software or even XP performance. Vista probably won't run on any of a random collection of machines put together by Infoworld, except that T61 but even that will suck. Meanwhile, people are pleasantly surprised when free software actually runs. This is what people keep seeing and saying. Why can't you admit that this is a massive free software advantage? Are you afraid of success?
They threw seven distributions at five random computers and saw that most of it worked, what's wrong with reporting that again? Put another way, how is telling the truth misleading? Lying, like the Microsoft people did about Vista is a huge mistake but no one said everything works - that's a commercial software thing. The situation is worse for people who make the Vista mistake, so places like Inforworld are starting to recommend software that works.
Here's another opinion you won't care for: Taser's lawsuits are obstruction of justice and Taser's corporate officers should be looking at jail time. Medical examiners believe Tasers can and do kill people. The best way to prove it is to look at police reports for statistics. Other forms of restraint should be just as deadly if hysteria is responsible for death. Alternate theories of heart failure due to electro shock look more promising than hysteria to me but thanks to the current judgement facts and statistics might not be available. That is a crime.
With significant Mac deployments in big companies, Microsoft only stuff won't fly. This is not as good as free software deployment but it's helpful. Increasing choice of tools in big companies is good for everyone but everyone's least favorite monopoly.
As long as common dissasters like Flash are used in all platforms, the diversity will only create marginal security improvements.
Call for backup. If life is really endangered, deadly force is justified.
The problem here is that Taser is pretending their stun gun is not an application of deadly force. Honest police officers are being encouraged to use a device that might kill. Dishonest police officers think they have a toy they abuse people with and that they might even get away with murder. The lie is a crime and Taser should be punished for it. It's malicious corporate behavior and those responsible should be stripped of their ill gotten gains. A class action lawsuit will come from this and it should target the company, it's officers and prominent investors. There would be no case if the company was not lying and simply admitted that they made a mistake instead of trying to cover up the evidence of that mistake. A bigger problem is that the harm they have done is not something that can be repaired with money. No amount of money the company has can make up for loss of life and honest policemen won't who have unintentionally killed won't get their sleep back.
What is really missing? My experience is that commercial software lags the free softare world with the most restrictive being at the bottom of the pack. There are very few applications where a free alternative is not available and none of them are general purpose desktop things most businesses and home users are intersted in.
Typing away on Slashdot, I can imagine a free news service and one that "rips off" other news services. No one owns facts. The real service is matching reader interest with world events and that's something Slashdot does very well. Looking at blog pages, I can further see that citizen reporting is flourishing and profitable. Your example of selling advertisements on top of another site is a commercial redistribution and not what I have in mind when I advocate "personal, verbatim copy." The New York times may or may not make the transition into the future of electronic publishing where they no longer have a monopoly on fact collection but there's no reason for them to do worse than any other group of gifted reporters and bloggers.
Classical musicians have as much or more to gain from their performances being shared and appreciated as anyone else. They surely don't make any money from record sales and publicity drives ticket sales. Someone else has already posted a link to free classical music.
Free software is a better deal regardless of Microsoft's perception and that perception is slipping everywhere. Microsoft's loss of face in the US is well documented and has more to do with Vista annoyances and "Works for Sure" DRM betrayal than it does with price. Free software, of course, comes with no such annoyances and consistently outperforms Windows on most hardware. People might be fooled into thinking Microsoft is less evil but will still know that free software is nothing but good.
That's two judges and both of them took more time and trouble to understand the issue. That says a lot about Beckman's position.
The absurdity of the copyright warrior opinion was well represented at the debate itself. When talking about "common sense" they failed to use much of it. Instead of looking at the intent of copyright law as established in the US Constitution, they picked apart meanings of various sections of copyright code and cases that have no real bearing. It is as if they took a highlighter to millions of pages of random text and selected the words that make their case best then triumphantly declared themselves masters of the Universe. Ouija-boards are more honest.
Scholars such as Lessig and philosophers like Stallman have looked at intent come to the very reasonable conclusion that verbatim, personal copy should always be allowed because it maximizes the advancement of the state of the arts. The language of the Constitution is as plain and Copyright is a created right we no longer need.
The Constitution can only be ignored by confusing people with frauds like "intellectual property." The most obvious madness is the DMCA's attack on free speech by turning trade secret into to a kind of perpetual patent in the name of copyright defense. By confusing the purpose of each of these separate things, the copyright warriors have combined their powers into something no reasonable person would agree with. When created rights trump natural rights, you know the laws are out of balance.
We are a nation of laws created with the consent of the governed. There are limits to what people will put up with no matter how clever Hansen and friends think they are.
Hansen thinks he would like to live in an aristocracy but he is sadly mistaken. He and his friends in the room feel good about their position in the world today but the more power they gain, the smaller the room will become. Aristocracy quickly becomes autocracy and autocrats have little need for lawyers once they are established. It starts with the mistaken notion of, "my opinion is more important than yours," and it ends with, "do as I say."
Once upon a time, when arms companies were owned by families, the movie may have been less than fantasy. There have been a few arms makers who turned to things like sewing machines and not always with loss of fortune. Today, arms companies are huge multinational companies without a soul. They will make and market whatever killing machines they can. Raytheon will make and sell this suit to anyone waging wars of aggression and shirk the responsibility as "it's up to politicians to make war and peace".
At this point, even that excuse is worthless. The US trades with and is becoming harder to tell apart from China. It is better now to now work for arms makers because the arms are not being used for conquest and oppression instead of the preservation of liberty.
Hardware bloat - HD space that will cost more and would be better used storing kids work and free textbooks.
Licensing costs - a few dollars per laptop.
Time and perception - more critical than anything else.
The OLPC project needs to keep telling foreign governments that the XO is cheaper and better than other laptops because it has avoided Windows. When confronted with the question of, "Does it run Windows" the answer should be a firm, "No and neither should you." This is what they believe, ultimately. Had they thought differently the XO would already run Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this stinks out loud. This kind of thing was less blatant with other commercial OS like OS/2 but that was eventually proved. There's no need for proof this time.
You can't do business in the US because there is no free press there. It's the Napster case all over again and the courts have learned nothing in the last decade. Their lust to protect what they perceive as a big US business interest has them reaching these absurd rulings for tenuous secondary encouragement of copyright infringement. The fact that it's impossible for anyone to tell who "owns" a digital file is reason to rethink copyright not destroy people's ability to share things they have every right to share. Decisions like this will leave the US a broadcast backwater in a world that's bursting with free culture.
A five year prison term might be preferable to experiences like this, especially when ratting out the FBI can save hundreds of thousands of innocent people from further constitutional abuse. I can not demand heroic action by others but I wish there had were more than three in the hundreds of thousands of abused citizens so far. Innocent people going to jail for protecting privacy of other innocent people would shut this monster program down fast.
Vote for anyone but Republicans in 2008 and vote out everyone who had anything to do with the poorly named Patriot act.
Political opposition can be tracked easily - cctv is a success and that's why cities in the US are installing traffic cameras as fast as the feds can pay for it.
Your tax money should not be spent tracking political opposition with cameras. You might not be someone like that but you benefit from their work in the same you benefit from newspapers but have no intention of exercising your free speech.
Orwell's dystopia was hardest on office workers. Of course everyone suffered grinding poverty, ignorance, cruelty and lack of freedom but only the more educated members of the state knew better. Anyone from the working class that did notice would be drafted into the continuous and intentionally wasteful war of the day. Office workers lived under a constant purge. The nastiest part about a real dystopia is that people believe with all of their might, effort and 2 minutes hate that nothing could be better. "Ordinary" life goes on for the vast majority.
Things are not that bad yet but the apparatus is incomplete. Journalist and bloggers are harassed for their opinions today. With just a little less freedom, as in Russia, they will be murdered. The US NeoCons are building red light cameras in the US and praying for another false flag operation like 9/11. They already have ChoicePoint and other databases to track opposition but they don't quite have public support for it or more. Free flowing information on the internet has prevented that, so look for broadcast media to become more insane and more to be done to kill the internet.
The purpose it so be able to track political opposition. "Terrorism" and then crime were excuses.
Why bother with DRM'd stuff in the first place?
GFS looks like it does most of what ZFS is supposed to do. There is no hubris in hoping that the nicer parts of ZFS are not patent encumbered - the hubris is in software patents and people who think they can own ideas. If there are no patents in the way, those better ideas will make their way into free file systems.
Free software works with hardware people already own, Vista does not. Microsoft might be able to scrape five computers together that run Vista but it won't match free software or even XP performance. Vista probably won't run on any of a random collection of machines put together by Infoworld, except that T61 but even that will suck. Meanwhile, people are pleasantly surprised when free software actually runs. This is what people keep seeing and saying. Why can't you admit that this is a massive free software advantage? Are you afraid of success?
They threw seven distributions at five random computers and saw that most of it worked, what's wrong with reporting that again? Put another way, how is telling the truth misleading? Lying, like the Microsoft people did about Vista is a huge mistake but no one said everything works - that's a commercial software thing. The situation is worse for people who make the Vista mistake, so places like Inforworld are starting to recommend software that works.
Big Brother knows who buys them.
Ah, but who's life and money will be taken?
Here's another opinion you won't care for: Taser's lawsuits are obstruction of justice and Taser's corporate officers should be looking at jail time. Medical examiners believe Tasers can and do kill people. The best way to prove it is to look at police reports for statistics. Other forms of restraint should be just as deadly if hysteria is responsible for death. Alternate theories of heart failure due to electro shock look more promising than hysteria to me but thanks to the current judgement facts and statistics might not be available. That is a crime.
With significant Mac deployments in big companies, Microsoft only stuff won't fly. This is not as good as free software deployment but it's helpful. Increasing choice of tools in big companies is good for everyone but everyone's least favorite monopoly.
As long as common dissasters like Flash are used in all platforms, the diversity will only create marginal security improvements.
Call for backup. If life is really endangered, deadly force is justified.
The problem here is that Taser is pretending their stun gun is not an application of deadly force. Honest police officers are being encouraged to use a device that might kill. Dishonest police officers think they have a toy they abuse people with and that they might even get away with murder. The lie is a crime and Taser should be punished for it. It's malicious corporate behavior and those responsible should be stripped of their ill gotten gains. A class action lawsuit will come from this and it should target the company, it's officers and prominent investors. There would be no case if the company was not lying and simply admitted that they made a mistake instead of trying to cover up the evidence of that mistake. A bigger problem is that the harm they have done is not something that can be repaired with money. No amount of money the company has can make up for loss of life and honest policemen won't who have unintentionally killed won't get their sleep back.
Yes but there is a common cause to these deaths, police intervention with taser. Calling it something else is a lie.
At the same time, it's nice of you to bring up previous quack explanations like hysteria, especially female hysteria which was cured by rape.
What is really missing? My experience is that commercial software lags the free softare world with the most restrictive being at the bottom of the pack. There are very few applications where a free alternative is not available and none of them are general purpose desktop things most businesses and home users are intersted in.
Typing away on Slashdot, I can imagine a free news service and one that "rips off" other news services. No one owns facts. The real service is matching reader interest with world events and that's something Slashdot does very well. Looking at blog pages, I can further see that citizen reporting is flourishing and profitable. Your example of selling advertisements on top of another site is a commercial redistribution and not what I have in mind when I advocate "personal, verbatim copy." The New York times may or may not make the transition into the future of electronic publishing where they no longer have a monopoly on fact collection but there's no reason for them to do worse than any other group of gifted reporters and bloggers.
Classical musicians have as much or more to gain from their performances being shared and appreciated as anyone else. They surely don't make any money from record sales and publicity drives ticket sales. Someone else has already posted a link to free classical music.
Free software is a better deal regardless of Microsoft's perception and that perception is slipping everywhere. Microsoft's loss of face in the US is well documented and has more to do with Vista annoyances and "Works for Sure" DRM betrayal than it does with price. Free software, of course, comes with no such annoyances and consistently outperforms Windows on most hardware. People might be fooled into thinking Microsoft is less evil but will still know that free software is nothing but good.
That's two judges and both of them took more time and trouble to understand the issue. That says a lot about Beckman's position.
The absurdity of the copyright warrior opinion was well represented at the debate itself. When talking about "common sense" they failed to use much of it. Instead of looking at the intent of copyright law as established in the US Constitution, they picked apart meanings of various sections of copyright code and cases that have no real bearing. It is as if they took a highlighter to millions of pages of random text and selected the words that make their case best then triumphantly declared themselves masters of the Universe. Ouija-boards are more honest.
Scholars such as Lessig and philosophers like Stallman have looked at intent come to the very reasonable conclusion that verbatim, personal copy should always be allowed because it maximizes the advancement of the state of the arts. The language of the Constitution is as plain and Copyright is a created right we no longer need.
The Constitution can only be ignored by confusing people with frauds like "intellectual property." The most obvious madness is the DMCA's attack on free speech by turning trade secret into to a kind of perpetual patent in the name of copyright defense. By confusing the purpose of each of these separate things, the copyright warriors have combined their powers into something no reasonable person would agree with. When created rights trump natural rights, you know the laws are out of balance.
We are a nation of laws created with the consent of the governed. There are limits to what people will put up with no matter how clever Hansen and friends think they are.
Hansen thinks he would like to live in an aristocracy but he is sadly mistaken. He and his friends in the room feel good about their position in the world today but the more power they gain, the smaller the room will become. Aristocracy quickly becomes autocracy and autocrats have little need for lawyers once they are established. It starts with the mistaken notion of, "my opinion is more important than yours," and it ends with, "do as I say."
Once upon a time, when arms companies were owned by families, the movie may have been less than fantasy. There have been a few arms makers who turned to things like sewing machines and not always with loss of fortune. Today, arms companies are huge multinational companies without a soul. They will make and market whatever killing machines they can. Raytheon will make and sell this suit to anyone waging wars of aggression and shirk the responsibility as "it's up to politicians to make war and peace".
At this point, even that excuse is worthless. The US trades with and is becoming harder to tell apart from China. It is better now to now work for arms makers because the arms are not being used for conquest and oppression instead of the preservation of liberty.
The movie itself is an advertisement for non free software. With a tie in as lame as that my expectations are rather low. Who knows, it might be entertaining.
What Windows will add to OLPC:
The OLPC project needs to keep telling foreign governments that the XO is cheaper and better than other laptops because it has avoided Windows. When confronted with the question of, "Does it run Windows" the answer should be a firm, "No and neither should you." This is what they believe, ultimately. Had they thought differently the XO would already run Windows.