I'm very surprised that no-one has pulled Katz up on this yet.
The very notion of pornography is a relatively new concept in human history. It came about in Victorian England when researchers from the British Museum...
This betrays rather gross ignorance.
Medieval English churches still bear images of "sheila-ni-gags" (sp?): pagan fertility charms; chubby women holding open their vaginas with their hands. While there was some effort to deface these in the 16th and 17th centuries, the real target of defacers was religious images (in a very literal interpretation of the Second Commandment).
The "no sex please, we're British" stereotype *is* recent, and was never accurate. The English are as raunchy as the rest of the world. Bowdlerism did reach its extremes there last century, messing up Shakespeare and the British Museum temporarily, but sexual repression is a battle which has been fought, and lost, in most countries at one time or another. My impression is that Victorian prudishness can be traced largely to the practices of single-sex boarding schools where *homosexuality* was both commonplace and brutally punished, leading to warped sexuality in most educated males and the families they raised. America had much the same problem for much the same reasons; the association of repression with religious morality is a consequence of the fact that religion is the place to turn to for moral injunctions of every kind, especially unjustifiable ones.
Pornography is an *ancient* Greek word which has been in use for a couple of thousands of years. The pornes were the lowest class of prostitutes; slave women who were available in brothels for free men to use for a price.
Slavery is not just use, it is licence to abuse. Women in prostitution have always been abused horifically. Despite the in-principle abolition of slavery, the emotional, chemical and physical abuse of prostitutes by pimps, clients and even the general public enslaves the majority of them. The pornes in old Athens were abused for entertainment. Pornography, in this context, is the graphic depiction of the abuse of women.
Modern use of the word extends it to all erotica. This is a pity, as there is plenty of erotica which is not related to abuse of people. Sex is, after all, fun. There is a real place for non-pornographic erotica in the lives of almost everyone.
But finding "porn" on the Internet or anywhere else is as likely to turn up images of the abuse of women as it is images of keen, free sex-workers or amateurs.
The smiles are often forced. The models are often drugged to their eyeballs. Thick makeup obscures sallow complexions, deep shadows and the bruises of physical abuse. It is not rare for pornographic material to be made at gunpoint, whether or not the gun is actually in the picture.
The ropes, the knives, the whips, the pegs and the candles are not just for show. The photographs and films of abuse are an actual record of actual abuse of actual people.
In particular the pictures of bound and gagged Asian women are usually actual photographs of actual sex-slaves in countries where such acts may be committed with impunity; teenagers are kidnapped or trapped with drugs and debt in brothels where Western and Japanese tourists may abuse them and photographs are taken to titillate potential customers only a click and an air-ticket away.
Abuse of women (and children, and men) is *real*. The photographs are *real*.
Pornography, in the proper sense of the word, is the record of the violation of human beings. As much as 50% of Internet "porn" is pornography in this sense. Often you can tell from the images that this is the case.
Please, JonKatz and all other freedom-loving wankers, remember that real people are suffering and enslaved *today* in the sex trade.
What you don't seem to understand, and I find this a lot, is that if men treated women like we treat each other, you would be facing a whole lot more ridicule, ego bashing, and all those things that you feel men put off on women unfairly because they are women. In reality, men tone down these things for women because they are sensitive to them.
Many men do consciously restrain themselves from abusing women, I'll give you that. It may even be true that many men really do go easy on women most of the time.
Women do have to put up with a heap of shit from guys though -- whether they are in male-dominated or predominantly female professions -- power relations, whether they be hierarchy or mob, generally (avoid absolute statements here, the times they are a-changing) place men above women. It's a good bet that if women are treated fairly in your workplace, they are doing jobs as important as men, for the same pay, and aren't considered "unusual". Women attempting to enter traditional men's arenas (heavy industry, police or military, engineering, or any place which simply hasn't included women before) have to put up with a lot of intolerance, which may take the form of sexual harassment or fake "blokey" caramaderie.
The reason men's reaction to change-room humour and taunts is different from women's is that to them, it isn't a threat. It's more of an affirmation; the power relations involved are known and relatively equal.
But if you treat a woman surrounded by men in the same way as you treat a man surrounded by men, it *is* different. She *is* threatened. She's an outsider. She has different equipment, has been accultured differently, has probably always been marked out as different (from other girls and from boys), and her position in the group is far from secure.
Do not underestimate men's insecurity. For many, many years men have been income-earners while women have been financially dependent upon them; in a workplace traditionally dominated by men the men are well aware that there are lots of women who *could* do their jobs, possibly better, possibly for less money (yes, even now. The women have less experience, don't they?). The first few women are the thin end of the wedge.
Yes, ridicule, physical torture, condescending attitudes, and the like *DO* happen towards women, but they do not happen with any more frequency than they happen to other men and in fact happen to a much lesser degree.
Half true. Ethnic cleansing consists in murdering the men and then raping the women. Such consideration! Treatment is *radically* different under violent circumstances -- and when violence is neither necessary nor prudent, power relations still have different ways of suborning women and men.
But half untrue. Day-to-day domestic violence is much more common than street crime, and much more common against women than men. Domestic violence is about maintaining a man's dominance in the home, often when his position outside it is threatened or he is already on the bottom of the heap.
And of course you mustn't forget that it is *men* who harrass, *men* who rape and beat, *men* who are behind the M16s in Latin America and Indonesia. The comrades of these men, the pack they hunt with, are *not* victims. The victims are outsiders, be they defenceless civilians, wives, prostitutes or women in the workplace.
There *is* something wrong with any movement devoted to free choice that excludes half the population.
There *is* something wrong with a culture where 50% of the population "chooses" to be excluded. Exclusion is never a choice, it's an imposition -- girls are discouraged from birth from technical inquisitiveness. This is an error; but the error and the sad fact that for many adult women it seems already "too late" (I have no idea if it really is too late; I hope not) is something which men and women interested in freedom have a serious interest in analysing and correcting.
GPL'd source may essentially never be used in a commercial project again, as all projects it is used within are forced to become non-commercial and subject to GPL.
You don't mean commercial, you mean proprietary. The FSF has a page describing the difference.
In short, commercial software is software developed for money. Proprietary software is software which is closely-held by its owners. The two concepts are orthogonal.
Bear in mind that you (or your company), as the author of a piece of software, have the right to release it under any license you like. This means that even after you release it under the GPL, you may re-release under a different license, so long as you do not include any modifications which are copyrighted by someone else. The FSF insists that "official" GNU software must have copyright assigned to the FSF for this reason, and to give them a stronger position if the GPL must ever be defended in court.
Releasing free software is a gesture of good will to users and to potential co-developers. Releasing free software under the GPL is a *promise* -- you won't take other people's free contributions and close them again without their permission. To release under the GPL is also foreclosing the ability of *other* developers re-releasing your software under a more restrictive license -- something that happens to BSD licensed software all the time -- without your co-operation. With your co-operation, anything is still possible.
Have you noticed that Cygnus releases software under the GPL which it doesn't give away for free? Customers have the *right* to copy and disseminate such programs to one another, but they choose to pay for it. Surely such software is worth quite a bit to those customers.
The FSF itself also makes a point of *selling* its software for a good price -- people can get it for free by download, but many continue to shell out hundreds for the official GNU distributions.
the terms of use are more invasive than the most predatory license agreements...
This is patently false. The GPL places NO RESTRICTIONS WHATSOEVER on use. It restricts *only* distribution of copies and of modified versions. Read it!
makes sense. I read sftd first and it blew me away. Only later did I track down Ender's Game and Xenocide; the latter was very sad in comparison to the opening salvos.
Socialisation of females, from infant feeding onwards, is typically full of put-downs and differential treatment. Boys are given more autonomy, better toys (in the sense that "boys toys" are better for develpopment of manual and mental dexterity) and more encouragement.
Girls who still end up with the inclination and confidence to go for a technical profession are in fact likely to have *more* innate ability, though it may be that (because of the usual confidence thing) their results in exams and interviews aren't the best.
Affirmative action might correct for this statistically, but in the sense that someone who isn't confident of her answers in an exam won't be confident of her answers on the job, it still doesn't deliver the right outcome.
Australians are under no obligation to disclose their tax file numbers to any organization. They just get taxed more if they don't.
There is no obligation to carry a driver's licence. You don't even have to carry it to drive a car, though you must be able to show it within 24 hours if you are stopped while driving by the police (it is an offence to drive unlicenced on public roads).
Voting has been compulsory all along. Or rather, turning up at a polling place and getting your name crossed off is. There is no obligation to put a valid paper in the box.
Picking up a gun is not the way to make your country better. Don't assume you have no power as a citizen beyond the threat of force; that should be your *last* resort. Realize that the you have much more potential influence over government in the US than the average person in most other countries does over theirs. Speak to your representatives about this, because someone should.
It's about time someone said this, and now I've heard it I'll be saying it over and over myself.
Democracy has become irrelevant in the US, thanks to the entrenched power of the Pentagon, its corporate subsidiaries and other major corporations, the two major parties
The ridiculous individualist ideology which values guns and investment above community and the vote keeps those people who might do something to improve public policy in opposition to public policy *itself*, as though the only possible policy was fascism. This leaves the US's more subtle, less fascist fascists firmly in control.
But the democratic institutions themselves exist! The US is, technically, a democratic country! Never mind that the Constitution (I mean the 1787 one, not the 1777 one) crippled the independent, radical democracy of the New England states; even Madison's document, designed to let "the people who own the country... run the country" allows for 'the people' to influence decisions at the highest level.
The US polity is flawed and its government (including the unaccountable corporate elite) is fundamentally serving its own interests alone. But violence is not the way to change that.
TAKE BACK YOUR FREEDOM by whatever means necessary including armed revolution against an oppressive government.
Armed revolution -- armed *anything*, really -- only leads to suffering and impoverishment.
The people in control of the oppressive government have no particular attachment to the American people as their preferred victims of oppression, and they aren't your elected officials, either. They are rather the chiefs of staff, secretaries of the executive, CEOs of defence corporations, major investors in defence corporations (which includes, not surprisingly, most of the major investors in most other major corporations too, so throw them in as well). Oh, and don't forget media magnates.
This elite has a better track record of oppressing third-world people (particularly in Latin America) with the help of purchased military establishments and governments there. It doesn't have the same clout in the US because it depends in large part on the good-will of the US public as consumers and voters (and some as skilled workers).
Since the 'enemy' isn't your elected officials per se but rather the estabishment, a confrontation on the grounds of force is a bit ridiculous. You'll put your life on the line, alongside millions of other Americans, to fight the PENTAGON?
The US is not the world's only superpower for no reason. It really does have the most powerful military ever to have existed. The Pentagon and the CIA have powerful allies (purchased by cash, drugs and blood) in the establishments of all the other powerful countries. China is *not* an exception.
So have your revolution, and enjoy the bloodbath. I don't think you'll find many to side with you, Truth and Justice against the American Way. Not if it's to be fought in the battlefield.
But if, OTOH, you use your vote and your right of association, you might get somewhere. It's a free country, compared with most.
Picking up a gun is not the way to make your country better. Don't assume you have no power as a citizen beyond the threat of force; that should be your *last* resort. Realize that the you have much more potential influence over government in the US than the average person in most other countries does over theirs. Speak to your representatives about this, because someone should.
It's about time someone said this, and now I've heard it I'll be saying it over and over myself.
Democracy has become irrelevant in the US, thanks to the entrenched power of the Pentagon, its corporate subsidiaries and other major corporations, the two major parties
The ridiculous individualist ideology which values guns and investment above community and the vote keeps those people who might do something to improve public policy in opposition to public policy *itself*, as though the only possible policy was fascism. This leaves the US's more subtle, less fascist fascists firmly in control.
But the democratic institutions themselves exist! The US is, technically, a democratic country! Never mind that the Constitution (I mean the 1796 one, not the 1779 one) crippled the independent, radical democracy of the New England states; even Madison's document, designed to let "the people who own the country... run the country" allows for 'the people' to influence decisions at the highest level.
The US polity is flawed and its government (including the unaccountable corporate elite) is fundamentally serving its own interests alone. But violence is not the way to change that.
The best way to keep a secret from public knowledge is to make sure it's freely available, but discredit anyone who takes it too seriously or tries to bring it to the public attention.
This has gone so far in the USA that level-headed reporting of facts which do not fall within the narrow permissible range (i.e., hawk-or-dove, GOP, Democrat or Libertarian) is swept under the carpet. Certainly the 'serious' newspapers and TV don't carry it. Publications like west-coast tabloids, 'mad socialist' rags and e-zines can get away with it because the people who matter -- investors and, to a lesser extent, voters -- don't read or believe these 'rumours'.
Honest reporters rarely make it to editorial positions in the decision-makers' media.
Fluff and shit helps a lot, and many things are kept secret successfully until it doesn't matter anymore but you'll be surprised how many people refuse to believe it -- even though it's in official, declassified documents.
Who cares *now* that the US funded and provided intelligence support to Nazi armies in the Soviet Union after the second world war was supposedly over, or that it adopted Nazi intelligence personnel and tactics in Europe?
Microsoft is not one of the smallest! They are one of the largest coporate political contributors... they are the most evil, though
This is in comparison to, say, Dupont (sells chemicals prepared for cocaine refining to South American suppliers, launched anti-hemp campaign in the 30s to sell chemicals to cotton farmers and reinforced it to sell synthetic fibres) or tobacco companies (drug pushers pure & simple)?
Microsoft is about as evil as McDonalds. Which is to say, it's not healthy and it crushes cultural diversity, but it's not profiting from substance dependencies (even if Maccas and billg do profit from other people abusing themselves).
one of the things Milosevic is best at is playing the propoganda game, twisting the news to meet the interpretation of the facts he wants.
Not half as good as Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and the United States State Department.
Read some back issues of Western papers and you will see plenty of reports of agression against Serbs, often many months before any retaliation was reported. The difference is that some atrocities (those perpetrated by nations who rely on heavy Western trade and investment) are reported on p. 5, while others (those perpetrated by nations who prefer to retain ownership of their assets) are reported on p. 1.
This is the whole point. Serbia wouldn't invite Western investors in, so it has to be taught a lesson. In ten years' time, all Yugoslav industry will be low-wage and foreign-owned.
Gee, I thought all those arial photos of mass graves were real. I guess I was wrong. I guess all those Kosovar women and children showing up at the border talking about how their husbands and fathers were shot into ditches were lying..I guess they had all that time marching to Macedonia to get their story straight.
I didn't see any photos of mass graves until a week after NATO's intervention.
Of course they're real. And so were the rapes and the forced marches. And NATO bombing gave them the excuse to hurry the job, as Western diplomats snubbed offers of talks with Serbian leaders, preferring to settle the argument with high explosives from a safe distance.
It is scary, in that by cutting off the 'net to Yugoslavia they are cutting off one of the most important means of *independent* communications. It's no longer possible for 'just anyone' to read the point of view of everyday people within Yugoslavia.
The Internet is a boldly subversive technology, once you realize that you don't have to get your information from Turner or Murdoch. You can get it from anyone prepared to give it. The Internet is the samizdat of the new world order, and it serves to undermine the Milosevics as well as the NATOs of the world.
In the last few weeks Yugoslavia has been transformed from a moderately wealthy industrial nation (with an oppressive government) into an underdeveloped one.
It has lost its oil refineries, its power stations, its television studios, its clothing and munitions factories, major bridges and gas pipelines. And yes, these losses mean more to the long-term future of the country than the loss of a few lives.
The public, who a year ago were vocal in their opposition to the President and to Yugoslav policy in Kosovo, are now almost unilaterally behind Milosevic. And it doesn't take a genius to see why.
Meanwhile ethnic cleansing has continued apace. Before NATO action, approx. 100,000 people had been "relocated" from Kosovo, with "several thousand" deaths. Now 3/4 of a million -- half Kosovo's Albanians, and most of them women & children -- have been moved, while many of the men have been shot or mobilized in the KLA.
This war is now on a par with that of Turkey against the PKK. Except that Serbia does not have the benefit of Western investment, commercial broadcast media, low-wage export industry and the drug trade -- it will have to beg for that later.
Slashdot has the advantage that there are customers with good money willing to pay to advertise to./'s audience, without wanting to dictate editorial content.
Just click on the ads if you want to pay Rob for his services. Everybody wins, this isn't a Murdoch publication!
So, yeah, it runs on NT, but there are reasons for that. (even though that may be unthinkable to some/.ers, who obviously have never had to do a professional site on a tight budget and deadline)
Actually many/.ers have done exactly that. What do you think Slashdot is?
And a good chunk of the blame for any site instability goes to Perl and PerlEx (which manages to throw away 50MB every time it restarts an interpreter...
Without that.
...can someone please show ActiveState how to check for memory leaks?)
Submit bug reports to ActiveState, not a bunch of Slashdotters. What would we know about Perl anyway?
Besides, the PerlEx license reads, inter alia: LIMITATIONS. You may not: modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble (except to the extent applicable laws specifically prohibit such restriction), or create derivative works of (except as provided otherwise herein) the Software; ...
Slashdot is a public forum, not a money-making machine. It does make a small profit, keeping our favourite administrators in leisure time, but at the moment it is not an in-your-face commercial venture.
If Rob needed more cash, he'd charge more for banner ads, put more of them in, or even go to the bank. Going to a VC is asking for millions, promising big returns. If slashdot was trying to make money off us (in a big way) it would turn off the traditional readership.
The Swiss culture of violence is one of disciplined self-defence. These people take oaths to defend their community, and they have an active democracy where every adult (until recently, only every man, but it's only men who are required to be armed) has a say in decision-making. While Swiss capitalism has a lot in common with the American one (free markets for everyone else, protection and subsidy at home), wealth is fairly evenly distributed amongst the population.
The American culture of violence is one of conquest and coercion. American democracy is a farce. Important decisions are made by investors and corporate lawyers, while politicians rubber-stamp them and rant at the public about religion, sex and "freedom" which means, protect the power of investors at all times.
The kind of ranting about the right to arm bears which many Americans go on with is purely selfish. It has nothing whatsoever with respecting the integrity of other citizens, let alone other *people*.
the man had to be a genius to take the broken nation of Germany and make it an industrial and military power.
Not really. It was very obvious public policy: spend lots on public works and armaments. Boost investment prospects with public spending to attract foreign capital. Make sure everybody was occupied and/or intimidated so that no-one would object to what *else* was going on. Steal land, capture slaves, take revenge on the enemies you respect and bring them under your wing.
But he didn't have to be a genius to throw it all away in a ridiculous conquest of the largest territory on earth, committing two-thirds of his country's armed forces in uncontrollable territory along a front four thousand kilometres long. *That* was the act of a fanatical madman who really thought that Germans could beat numerically and industrially superior forces simply by virtue of being superior Aryans. Stalingrad proved it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm very surprised that no-one has pulled Katz up on this yet.
...
The very notion of pornography is a relatively new concept in human history. It came about in Victorian England when researchers from the British Museum
This betrays rather gross ignorance.
Medieval English churches still bear images of "sheila-ni-gags" (sp?): pagan fertility charms; chubby women holding open their vaginas with their hands. While there was some effort to deface these in the 16th and 17th centuries, the real target of defacers was religious images (in a very literal interpretation of the Second Commandment).
The "no sex please, we're British" stereotype *is* recent, and was never accurate. The English are as raunchy as the rest of the world. Bowdlerism did reach its extremes there last century, messing up Shakespeare and the British Museum temporarily, but sexual repression is a battle which has been fought, and lost, in most countries at one time or another. My impression is that Victorian prudishness can be traced largely to the practices of single-sex boarding schools where *homosexuality* was both commonplace and brutally punished, leading to warped sexuality in most educated males and the families they raised. America had much the same problem for much the same reasons; the association of repression with religious morality is a consequence of the fact that religion is the place to turn to for moral injunctions of every kind, especially unjustifiable ones.
Pornography is an *ancient* Greek word which has been in use for a couple of thousands of years. The pornes were the lowest class of prostitutes; slave women who were available in brothels for free men to use for a price.
Slavery is not just use, it is licence to abuse. Women in prostitution have always been abused horifically. Despite the in-principle abolition of slavery, the emotional, chemical and physical abuse of prostitutes by pimps, clients and even the general public enslaves the majority of them. The pornes in old Athens were abused for entertainment. Pornography, in this context, is the graphic depiction of the abuse of women.
Modern use of the word extends it to all erotica. This is a pity, as there is plenty of erotica which is not related to abuse of people. Sex is, after all, fun. There is a real place for non-pornographic erotica in the lives of almost everyone.
But finding "porn" on the Internet or anywhere else is as likely to turn up images of the abuse of women as it is images of keen, free sex-workers or amateurs.
The smiles are often forced. The models are often drugged to their eyeballs. Thick makeup obscures sallow complexions, deep shadows and the bruises of physical abuse. It is not rare for pornographic material to be made at gunpoint, whether or not the gun is actually in the picture.
The ropes, the knives, the whips, the pegs and the candles are not just for show. The photographs and films of abuse are an actual record of actual abuse of actual people.
In particular the pictures of bound and gagged Asian women are usually actual photographs of actual sex-slaves in countries where such acts may be committed with impunity; teenagers are kidnapped or trapped with drugs and debt in brothels where Western and Japanese tourists may abuse them and photographs are taken to titillate potential customers only a click and an air-ticket away.
Abuse of women (and children, and men) is *real*. The photographs are *real*.
Pornography, in the proper sense of the word, is the record of the violation of human beings. As much as 50% of Internet "porn" is pornography in this sense. Often you can tell from the images that this is the case.
Please, JonKatz and all other freedom-loving wankers, remember that real people are suffering and enslaved *today* in the sex trade.
Jonathan
What you don't seem to understand, and I find this a lot, is that if men treated women like we treat each other, you would be facing a whole lot more ridicule, ego bashing, and all those things that you feel men put off on women unfairly because they are women. In reality, men tone down these things for women because they are sensitive to them.
Many men do consciously restrain themselves from abusing women, I'll give you that. It may even be true that many men really do go easy on women most of the time.
Women do have to put up with a heap of shit from guys though -- whether they are in male-dominated or predominantly female professions -- power relations, whether they be hierarchy or mob, generally (avoid absolute statements here, the times they are a-changing) place men above women. It's a good bet that if women are treated fairly in your workplace, they are doing jobs as important as men, for the same pay, and aren't considered "unusual". Women attempting to enter traditional men's arenas (heavy industry, police or military, engineering, or any place which simply hasn't included women before) have to put up with a lot of intolerance, which may take the form of sexual harassment or fake "blokey" caramaderie.
The reason men's reaction to change-room humour and taunts is different from women's is that to them, it isn't a threat. It's more of an affirmation; the power relations involved are known and relatively equal.
But if you treat a woman surrounded by men in the same way as you treat a man surrounded by men, it *is* different. She *is* threatened. She's an outsider. She has different equipment, has been accultured differently, has probably always been marked out as different (from other girls and from boys), and her position in the group is far from secure.
Do not underestimate men's insecurity. For many, many years men have been income-earners while women have been financially dependent upon them; in a workplace traditionally dominated by men the men are well aware that there are lots of women who *could* do their jobs, possibly better, possibly for less money (yes, even now. The women have less experience, don't they?). The first few women are the thin end of the wedge.
Yes, ridicule, physical torture, condescending attitudes, and the like *DO* happen towards women, but they do not happen with any more frequency than they happen to other men and in fact happen to a much lesser degree.
Half true. Ethnic cleansing consists in murdering the men and then raping the women. Such consideration! Treatment is *radically* different under violent circumstances -- and when violence is neither necessary nor prudent, power relations still have different ways of suborning women and men.
But half untrue. Day-to-day domestic violence is much more common than street crime, and much more common against women than men. Domestic violence is about maintaining a man's dominance in the home, often when his position outside it is threatened or he is already on the bottom of the heap.
And of course you mustn't forget that it is *men* who harrass, *men* who rape and beat, *men* who are behind the M16s in Latin America and Indonesia. The comrades of these men, the pack they hunt with, are *not* victims. The victims are outsiders, be they defenceless civilians, wives, prostitutes or women in the workplace.
There *is* something wrong with any movement devoted to free choice that excludes half the population.
There *is* something wrong with a culture where 50% of the population "chooses" to be excluded. Exclusion is never a choice, it's an imposition -- girls are discouraged from birth from technical inquisitiveness. This is an error; but the error and the sad fact that for many adult women it seems already "too late" (I have no idea if it really is too late; I hope not) is something which men and women interested in freedom have a serious interest in analysing and correcting.
Jonathan
GPL'd source may essentially never be used in a commercial project again, as all projects it is used within are forced to become non-commercial and subject to GPL.
You don't mean commercial, you mean proprietary. The FSF has a page describing the difference.
In short, commercial software is software developed for money. Proprietary software is software which is closely-held by its owners. The two concepts are orthogonal.
Bear in mind that you (or your company), as the author of a piece of software, have the right to release it under any license you like. This means that even after you release it under the GPL, you may re-release under a different license, so long as you do not include any modifications which are copyrighted by someone else. The FSF insists that "official" GNU software must have copyright assigned to the FSF for this reason, and to give them a stronger position if the GPL must ever be defended in court.
Releasing free software is a gesture of good will to users and to potential co-developers. Releasing free software under the GPL is a *promise* -- you won't take other people's free contributions and close them again without their permission. To release under the GPL is also foreclosing the ability of *other* developers re-releasing your software under a more restrictive license -- something that happens to BSD licensed software all the time -- without your co-operation. With your co-operation, anything is still possible.
Have you noticed that Cygnus releases software under the GPL which it doesn't give away for free? Customers have the *right* to copy and disseminate such programs to one another, but they choose to pay for it. Surely such software is worth quite a bit to those customers.
The FSF itself also makes a point of *selling* its software for a good price -- people can get it for free by download, but many continue to shell out hundreds for the official GNU distributions.
the terms of use are more invasive than the most predatory license agreements...
This is patently false. The GPL places NO RESTRICTIONS WHATSOEVER on use. It restricts *only* distribution of copies and of modified versions. Read it!
Jonathan
makes sense. I read sftd first and it blew me away. Only later did I track down Ender's Game and Xenocide; the latter was very sad in comparison to the opening salvos.
J
hear hear!
Affirmative Action is too little, too late.
What is required is *affirmation*.
Socialisation of females, from infant feeding onwards, is typically full of put-downs and differential treatment. Boys are given more autonomy, better toys (in the sense that "boys toys" are better for develpopment of manual and mental dexterity) and more encouragement.
Girls who still end up with the inclination and confidence to go for a technical profession are in fact likely to have *more* innate ability, though it may be that (because of the usual confidence thing) their results in exams and interviews aren't the best.
Affirmative action might correct for this statistically, but in the sense that someone who isn't confident of her answers in an exam won't be confident of her answers on the job, it still doesn't deliver the right outcome.
Loretta Cohen,
Secretary, PFJ
Isn't it
So long, and thanks for all the ghoti?
(couGH, wOmen, moTIon)
...compulsory tax-file numbers, compulsory voting, compulsory carrying of drivers licenses (with photos)
Australians are under no obligation to disclose their tax file numbers to any organization. They
just get taxed more if they don't.
There is no obligation to carry a driver's licence. You don't even have to carry it to drive a car, though you must be able to show it within 24 hours if you are stopped while driving by the police (it is an offence to drive unlicenced on public roads).
Voting has been compulsory all along. Or rather, turning up at a polling place and getting your name crossed off is. There is no obligation to put a valid paper in the box.
But you know all that.
J
Please note that Linus hasn't earned a degree.
Hasn't he already got two?
J
Picking up a gun is not the way to make your country better. Don't assume you have no power as a citizen beyond the threat of force; that should be your *last* resort. Realize that the you have much more potential influence over government in the US than the average person in most other countries does over theirs. Speak to your representatives about this, because someone should.
... run the country" allows for 'the people' to influence decisions at the highest level.
It's about time someone said this, and now I've heard it I'll be saying it over and over myself.
Democracy has become irrelevant in the US, thanks to the entrenched power of the Pentagon, its corporate subsidiaries and other major corporations, the two major parties
The ridiculous individualist ideology which values guns and investment above community and the vote keeps those people who might do something to improve public policy in opposition to public policy *itself*, as though the only possible policy was fascism. This leaves the US's more subtle, less fascist fascists firmly in control.
But the democratic institutions themselves exist! The US is, technically, a democratic country! Never mind that the Constitution (I mean the 1787 one, not the 1777 one) crippled the independent, radical democracy of the New England states; even Madison's document, designed to let "the people who own the country
The US polity is flawed and its government (including the unaccountable corporate elite) is fundamentally serving its own interests alone. But violence is not the way to change that.
Thanks.
J
TAKE BACK YOUR FREEDOM by whatever means necessary including armed revolution against an oppressive government.
Armed revolution -- armed *anything*, really -- only leads to suffering and impoverishment.
The people in control of the oppressive government have no particular attachment to the American people as their preferred victims of oppression, and they aren't your elected officials, either. They are rather the chiefs of staff, secretaries of the executive, CEOs of defence corporations, major investors in defence corporations (which includes, not surprisingly, most of the major investors in most other major corporations too, so throw them in as well). Oh, and don't forget media magnates.
This elite has a better track record of oppressing third-world people (particularly in Latin America) with the help of purchased military establishments and governments there. It doesn't have the same clout in the US because it depends in large part on the good-will of the US public as consumers and voters (and some as skilled workers).
Since the 'enemy' isn't your elected officials per se but rather the estabishment, a confrontation on the grounds of force is a bit ridiculous. You'll put your life on the line, alongside millions of other Americans, to fight the PENTAGON?
The US is not the world's only superpower for no reason. It really does have the most powerful military ever to have existed. The Pentagon and the CIA have powerful allies (purchased by cash, drugs and blood) in the establishments of all the other powerful countries. China is *not* an exception.
So have your revolution, and enjoy the bloodbath. I don't think you'll find many to side with you, Truth and Justice against the American Way. Not if it's to be fought in the battlefield.
But if, OTOH, you use your vote and your right of association, you might get somewhere. It's a free country, compared with most.
J.
Picking up a gun is not the way to make your country better. Don't assume you have no power as a citizen beyond the threat of force; that should be your *last* resort. Realize that the you have much more potential influence over government in the US than the average person in most other countries does over theirs. Speak to your representatives about this, because someone should.
... run the country" allows for 'the people' to influence decisions at the highest level.
It's about time someone said this, and now I've heard it I'll be saying it over and over myself.
Democracy has become irrelevant in the US, thanks to the entrenched power of the Pentagon, its corporate subsidiaries and other major corporations, the two major parties
The ridiculous individualist ideology which values guns and investment above community and the vote keeps those people who might do something to improve public policy in opposition to public policy *itself*, as though the only possible policy was fascism. This leaves the US's more subtle, less fascist fascists firmly in control.
But the democratic institutions themselves exist! The US is, technically, a democratic country! Never mind that the Constitution (I mean the 1796 one, not the 1779 one) crippled the independent, radical democracy of the New England states; even Madison's document, designed to let "the people who own the country
The US polity is flawed and its government (including the unaccountable corporate elite) is fundamentally serving its own interests alone. But violence is not the way to change that.
Thanks.
J
The best way to keep a secret from public knowledge is to make sure it's freely available, but discredit anyone who takes it too seriously or tries to bring it to the public attention.
This has gone so far in the USA that level-headed reporting of facts which do not fall within the narrow permissible range (i.e., hawk-or-dove, GOP, Democrat or Libertarian) is swept under the carpet. Certainly the 'serious' newspapers and TV don't carry it. Publications like west-coast tabloids, 'mad socialist' rags and e-zines can get away with it because the people who matter -- investors and, to a lesser extent, voters -- don't read or believe these 'rumours'.
Honest reporters rarely make it to editorial positions in the decision-makers' media.
Fluff and shit helps a lot, and many things are kept secret successfully until it doesn't matter anymore but you'll be surprised how many people refuse to believe it -- even though it's in official, declassified documents.
Who cares *now* that the US funded and provided intelligence support to Nazi armies in the Soviet Union after the second world war was supposedly over, or that it adopted Nazi intelligence personnel and tactics in Europe?
J
Microsoft is not one of the smallest! They are one of the largest coporate political contributors ... they are the most evil, though
This is in comparison to, say, Dupont (sells chemicals prepared for cocaine refining to South American suppliers, launched anti-hemp campaign in the 30s to sell chemicals to cotton farmers and reinforced it to sell synthetic fibres) or tobacco companies (drug pushers pure & simple)?
Microsoft is about as evil as McDonalds. Which is to say, it's not healthy and it crushes cultural diversity, but it's not profiting from substance dependencies (even if Maccas and billg do profit from other people abusing themselves).
J
or to some select few selected by someone in power
Like the GOP and the Democrats, with some Libertarian salt for good measure?
If it's good for business, it's good for America.
Not necessarily for Americans.
Money talks.
J
one of the things Milosevic is best at is playing the propoganda game, twisting the news to meet the interpretation of the facts he wants.
Not half as good as Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and the United States State Department.
Read some back issues of Western papers and you will see plenty of reports of agression against Serbs, often many months before any retaliation was reported. The difference is that some atrocities (those perpetrated by nations who rely on heavy Western trade and investment) are reported on p. 5, while others (those perpetrated by nations who prefer to retain ownership of their assets) are reported on p. 1.
That's all.
J
I say we bomb Serbia into the F***g stone age.
This is the whole point. Serbia wouldn't invite Western investors in, so it has to be taught a lesson. In ten years' time, all Yugoslav industry will be low-wage and foreign-owned.
Like Indonesia.
J
Gee, I thought all those arial photos of mass graves were real. I guess I was wrong. I guess all those Kosovar women and children showing up at the border talking about how their husbands and fathers were shot into ditches were lying..I guess they had all that time marching to Macedonia to get their story straight.
I didn't see any photos of mass graves until a week after NATO's intervention.
Of course they're real. And so were the rapes and the forced marches. And NATO bombing gave them the excuse to hurry the job, as Western diplomats snubbed offers of talks with Serbian leaders, preferring to settle the argument with high explosives from a safe distance.
J
It is scary, in that by cutting off the 'net to Yugoslavia they are cutting off one of the most important means of *independent* communications. It's no longer possible for 'just anyone' to read the point of view of everyday people within Yugoslavia.
The Internet is a boldly subversive technology, once you realize that you don't have to get your information from Turner or Murdoch. You can get it from anyone prepared to give it. The Internet is the samizdat of the new world order, and it serves to undermine the Milosevics as well as the NATOs of the world.
In the last few weeks Yugoslavia has been transformed from a moderately wealthy industrial nation (with an oppressive government) into an underdeveloped one.
It has lost its oil refineries, its power stations, its television studios, its clothing and munitions factories, major bridges and gas pipelines. And yes, these losses mean more to the long-term future of the country than the loss of a few lives.
The public, who a year ago were vocal in their opposition to the President and to Yugoslav policy in Kosovo, are now almost unilaterally behind Milosevic. And it doesn't take a genius to see why.
Meanwhile ethnic cleansing has continued apace. Before NATO action, approx. 100,000 people had been "relocated" from Kosovo, with "several thousand" deaths. Now 3/4 of a million -- half Kosovo's Albanians, and most of them women & children -- have been moved, while many of the men have been shot or mobilized in the KLA.
This war is now on a par with that of Turkey against the PKK. Except that Serbia does not have the benefit of Western investment, commercial broadcast media, low-wage export industry and the drug trade -- it will have to beg for that later.
J
Whaddayamean, martyr?
Is there something you're hiding?
What do you think the banner ads are for?
./'s audience, without wanting to dictate editorial content.
Slashdot has the advantage that there are customers with good money willing to pay to advertise to
Just click on the ads if you want to pay Rob for his services. Everybody wins, this isn't a Murdoch publication!
J
Actually, come to think of it, this sounds more like a server memory-management bug than a PerlEx plugin bug.
Microsoft support, anyone?
So, yeah, it runs on NT, but there are reasons for that. (even though that may be unthinkable to some /.ers, who obviously have never had to do a professional site on a tight budget and deadline)
/.ers have done exactly that. What do you think Slashdot is?
...can someone please show ActiveState how to check for memory leaks?)
Actually many
And a good chunk of the blame for any site instability goes to Perl and PerlEx (which manages to throw away 50MB every time it restarts an interpreter...
Without that.
Submit bug reports to ActiveState, not a bunch of Slashdotters. What would we know about Perl anyway?
Besides, the PerlEx license reads, inter alia:
LIMITATIONS. You may not:
modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble (except to the extent applicable laws specifically prohibit such restriction), or create derivative works of (except as provided otherwise herein) the Software;
...
Source? Patches? Hah.
Jonathan
Slashdot is a public forum, not a money-making machine. It does make a small profit, keeping our favourite administrators in leisure time, but at the moment it is not an in-your-face commercial venture.
If Rob needed more cash, he'd charge more for banner ads, put more of them in, or even go to the bank. Going to a VC is asking for millions, promising big returns. If slashdot was trying to make money off us (in a big way) it would turn off the traditional readership.
Don't you think so?
Jonathan
The Swiss culture of violence is one of disciplined self-defence. These people take oaths to defend their community, and they have an active democracy where every adult (until recently, only every man, but it's only men who are required to be armed) has a say in decision-making. While Swiss capitalism has a lot in common with the American one (free markets for everyone else, protection and subsidy at home), wealth is fairly evenly distributed amongst the population.
The American culture of violence is one of conquest and coercion. American democracy is a farce. Important decisions are made by investors and corporate lawyers, while politicians rubber-stamp them and rant at the public about religion, sex and "freedom" which means, protect the power of investors at all times.
The kind of ranting about the right to arm bears which many Americans go on with is purely selfish. It has nothing whatsoever with respecting the integrity of other citizens, let alone other *people*.
Jonathan
the man had to be a genius to take the broken nation of Germany and make it an industrial and military power.
Not really. It was very obvious public policy: spend lots on public works and armaments. Boost investment prospects with public spending to attract foreign capital. Make sure everybody was occupied and/or intimidated so that no-one would object to what *else* was going on. Steal land, capture slaves, take revenge on the enemies you respect and bring them under your wing.
But he didn't have to be a genius to throw it all away in a ridiculous conquest of the largest territory on earth, committing two-thirds of his country's armed forces in uncontrollable territory along a front four thousand kilometres long. *That* was the act of a fanatical madman who really thought that Germans could beat numerically and industrially superior forces simply by virtue of being superior Aryans. Stalingrad proved it.