I don't care if you want to swear by the Linus kernel, but it gets killed by IO. I mean, come on, I'm using 2.4.12, and I can't rip a CD an play an MP3. Under the AC series, I can rip CDs, play MP3s, watch divx movies, surf the web, untar a file, and have a compile job going at the same time. Even for more usual setups, like viewing a video without doing anything else, the Linus kernel drops frames left and right, whereas the AC series laughs at it. Don't tell me I need to use mplayer with SDL, because I do.
Because I treat my Linux box as though it were a Windows box (one of the reason I switched over to Linux for everything is that the widgets in GTK are prettier than the widgets in Windows -- it's nice to have people ask me how to get their desktops to look like mine and tell them they have to install linux) and I expect it run at least as well as a Windows machine, I must use the AC series. While I'm sure that the Linus kernel has it's applications, it is simply unacceptable for replacing the Windows kernel.
Mod me flamebait or troll if you want, but I speak the truth. I have a Thunderbird-750 with 224 MB of ram, and I find it simply unacceptable when I can't run Quake or view movies under linux because of the Linus kernel. When mp3s skip because I'm moving some data around, it tells me that something is wrong with the Linus kernel. I'm glad that I had a friend who introduced me to the AC series, or I would have given up on linux. Plain and simple, politics aside, the end user doesn't care that he's being loyal to Linus the Great, he just cares that he can view that movie. If Windows outperforms linux in multimedia, he'll use Windows.
That's not my point: no one cares about Russian Programmers (stupid commies), College professors (probably brainwashing young people with their revisionist history), teenagers (damn teenagers they should all go the hell and die), and hackers (the media has spoken). No one in a majority has really been hurt by the DMCA yet, so nothing will happen. At this point, only bloody revolution will do anything, and that requires much more than a DMCA or even an SSSCA (although that might just do it, we'll have to see).
That's funny, because it won't make a difference. How many people out there who own an Aibo even knew that the site existed, much less were interested in using this guy's software? The reason that Sony can get away with bullying web sites and colleges is that no one cares. Let's face it: what damage has the DMCA really done? Why should anyone care about the DMCA? It really doesn't make a difference yet.
The DMCA's lack of affecting more than just the "information wants to be free" zealots, which is just a fringe group, is the reason that crap like this happens.
Ok, isn't SafeSurf among the guys responsible for not letting me do research on breast cancer, transsexualism, gay rights, the second amendment, and drug abuse, among other things not suited for the children? Here are a few points:
SafeSurf is easily guilty of the same things it accuses MAPS of, namely censorship.
Most of SafeSurf's argument is dependant on the children, and this should set off a red flag.
SafeSurf's basically saying that it's their liberty to participate in denying liberty to others.
SafeSurf accuses MAPS of being "blinded by the smell of spammer's blood," not seeming "to care how many innocent Web sites they trounce in the process." Couldn't the same easily be said about SafeSurf's obsession over filtering anything they this is unsuitable for the children?
"Censorship is a broad brush that drips paint on the pure, as well as the tainted." Listen to your own words, SafeSurf.
Overall, the strength of the rhetoric compared to the severity of the problem here and the difficulty that MAPS would have avoiding the problem tends to indicate to me that SafeSurf really has no case, and they know it.
SafeSurf seems too concerned about the children for me to really take them seriously
Wasachu is an Iriquois (I think) word meaning "stealers of the fat." It was used by a lot of Indian (I forget the language, but Indian means "they who perservere") writers in my 10th grade high school English class.
If I type in "Jew" and use the thesarus should it provide "kike" or "mud-person"? Or how about if I put in "white" should it fill in "trailer-trash" or "cracker"? How about if I put in "gay" - how about "ass-master" or "faggot". Blacks? How about "nigger" or "one of those them there coloreds".
*Yes!* Like it or not, all those words and phrases are part of our language. If you don't want to use them, you don't have to. (To tell you the truth, I was called wasachu and whitie so many times by half-assed writers in my various English classes to not give a damn if someone get offended at nigger -- it's a word, you live with it.) It's up to us to decide whether we're above racist terms and ideas or merely ignorant of them. Ignorance won't make the problem go away, I can tell you that.
Those all mean the same thing, do they not? They all have the same meanings, don't they? Whats the big deal, right?
No! Does nigger == African? Does wasachu == European? No; each word has it's own connotation, meaning, and context. To suggest that all instances of horrible, wicked, nasty, etc., be replaced by bad, for example, is insane.
We should just give all cases of all words no matter what?
Yes! That's what a thesaurus is for!
Anything else is "1984" right?
Yes! That's *exactly* what happened in 1984! The changes were gradual, but they took place. Microsoft is not doing anyone a service here; rather they are doing us all a disservice by not trusting us to know our own language.
So? This just mean that Office XP is broken, and no one should use it. Open source needs to shove that down everyone's throat. I refuse to use broken software, which is why I stopped using Windows to begin with. I usually head for my paper thesaurus, so I don't know of any open source thesauri, but google gives me a link to WordNet.
We're not sure yet, what the effects of this law will be. Laws are often interpreted in odd ways. But even if dfreedom/dt is very small, it doesn't mean that it isn't negative. You know how to boil a frog, right? And we all know how there was no one left in Germany to be concerned for Pastor Niemoeller. Just remember that this war has no end in sight. You're acquainted with the oddities concerning the unwinnable drug war, right? Well, now we're fighting another unwinnable war, but it's against bad men this time. I think that given that light, a healthy bit of skepticism is in order.
I don't care what they do, whether they're javascript-happy or lynx zealots (if you want a text-based browser, use links at least -- it's multithreaded so you don't have all those horrible little pauses and it actually has the best download manager I've ever seen), but they must do it properly.
If the font tag is that great for you, use valid HTML 3.2, but I would recommend XHTML 1.0 and CSS. CSS has many advantages over the font tag and the like that are important, but I will omit for brevity. Needless to say, separating structure from apperance is good, because you can concentrate on making your page first, then making it look pretty later. In adition, if you've ever had to change many different font tags because you didn't like the size of your font, you'll be happy to know that CSS cascades so that you only have to set something else once, and every element under it changes likewise. Even then, I rarely use style like <span style="blah">, because simply specifying styles as classes works much better when I want to deviate for the style I've already set for whatever element I want to change.
Whether or not they can spell, I don't care, but please don't force browser writers to keep guessing at what the page author means by his mangeled html. It's very annoying and causes different browsers to do different things, which most people solve by using javascript detect scripts. Those are unneccesary, because if everyone would just adhere to the W3 standards and use CSS (which can do a lot of things that javascript is often used for), you wouldn't need all that junk.
Yes, I know, using vim to hand edit a page is a bit scary at first, but I will never understand people that claim to be able to write web pages, but have never seen html in their life, much less know what valid html looks like. The best part about editors like vim are, is that they support all version of html, javascript, etc., and are free.
Ok, so we've rated movies. Big deal. Parents
let their kids see R movies all the time, and what male teenager hasn't seen a pr0n flic at his friend's house?
Ok, so we've rated games. Big deal. Parents let their kids play M rated games all the time, and what male teenager hasn't downloaded a pr0n-type game at his own house?
Ok, so we're rating web sites. Big deal. Parents'll let their kids view M rate web sites all the time, and what male teenager won't view a pr0n site in his room?
Rating content does virtually noting because everyone know that the censors are arbitrary. However, one negative effect of rating is the censorship itself. Movies have to cut back content all the time to just squeeze on less severe rating.
In spite of that otherwise lack of an effect, principle still argues against rating. Rating is essentially a for of censorship, because it tells people what to think of a movie in one letter before they talk to someone who can give them an essay of description. Any kind of censorship is bad, because it is ignorance. Because something is censored in a movie, doesn't make it go away. And of all the absurd things that Americans censor for! Why is it that American culture is so obsessed with locking sex, a fundamental aspect of life, in the closet, while it revels in killing of other human beings, which isn't necessary at all! Censorship, in America at least, because of the culture, turns movies into perversions of real life.
But, like I said, it's not like anyone will really listen to these ratings.
Does this surprise anyone else? If it does, shame on you for not being wary. You should know better; the NSA wasn't the end, ECHELON wasn't the end, Carnivore wasn't the end, and this won't be the end either. Anyway, I don't care if they put a box between my computer and the wall, because I use GPG for everything I don't want Big Brother to know.
I wonder if you could come up with a non-toxic ferrofluid, sneak it in someone's drink, then pull them around with a big huge magnet? Or even better... he's sure got an attractive personality
Ok, so ispell and derivitives aren't the best, but only because they need a larger vocabulary. But I've never ever had anything as strange as what happened Speedie happen. What the heck was the name of that word processor that I've never heard of before, Applixware? WTF is that? She should have been using Abiword or KWord at least. (I'll bet that she could have just as easily used vim -- she was probably only writing memos anyway.) The author of this article is a hopeless moron who is just trying to intimidate linux users into confroming to the Gates paradigm (gah! not that word!) of the future and into becoming mindless Microsoft drones. (Even then I don't understand what he's trying to do or what his motivation is here in sabotaging his own company, Redhat, like that.)
Well, it should be obvious to anyone that the problem is that they hired the comic book store owner, who, as we all should know from the Simpsons, knows nothing about embedded systems at all. Why were these people even using a comic book store as a reference anyway?! I mean, the guy can tell you why Aqua Man can't marry Wonder Woman, but as for embedded systems, what was the author of this story thinking?
Seriously though, as it's been pointed out before, this guy is far from a guru. A guru writes stuff that works; this guy doesn't, his "quirkiness" notwithstanding. I don't know about the rest of slashdotters, but I think the whole team-approach that's supposed to be the new "paradigm" (gah! there's that word again!) is a bunch of hooey. People aren't a bunch of lemmings, and, contrary to what the Man would have you think, one person with a MSCE or whatever does not equal another person with an MSCE or whatever. Every person is unique, and some people just have a knack for certain things. Sure, every person can learn programming, but very few ever reach guru-like wisdom. Not only is it unfair to people who have better skills to treat them as though they don't because they're in a "team," but it shortchanges the company in the end. If the gifted aren't recognized for their skills, they'll pack up and look for a place that does recognize them as something more than a means to an end.
Well, first of all, I'm an mtf transsexual and I think that naturally born women are a bunch of pampered whiners who really need learn a few lessons in toughness. But that's not my point in writing this.
Actually, I find spam amusing, so I set up an account just for recieving spam. If there is a site that won't let me in, or if I'm not sure about the party I'm giving my email to, I give them my spam account, and so far it's worked wonderfully. Only to people whom I have met in real life do I give my real email to. Besides, if it weren't for spam, we wouldn't know how to get those extra 3" on our dicks and increase our bust size two cups, ne?
eek. I'll have to work on my communication skills, because that's what I was trying to say. The United States culture is insane, so everything else about the United States is insane. German culture is mature and experienced, so everything else about Germany is mature. On thing I remember about being to Germany was how amazed everyone was about how easilly prozac and whatnot can be obtained in the US, but yet how a useful device like a Handi can cost so much. They also would rather save sex and "bad" language than violence. But, Americans live in a land of the free, so they'll turn a blind eye to anything their government does that proves contrary.
The problem with your point is that you're in Germany, not the land of the free. The fact that we're in the land of the free makes a national ID card that much more dangerous. People don't think, not here or in Germany, and if they have the impression that they live in the land of the free, they'll let the government get away with any number of oddities for great justice.
I went to Germany for three weeks this summer, and one thing I learned was that the United States culture is insane. Germans can have a national ID-type card because they haven't convinced themselves that, no matter what their government does, they live in a land of the free. The American have however, and that just lets their government do all sorts of strange things in the name of great justice. Maybe when American culture is as old as German culture, the Americans will be able to have an ID card. The American public will let their government create classes of thoughcriminals if they have national id cards, especially in the not entirely unwarranted paranoid state that they're in now.
That's what you think. By a strict definition of crime, that is, causing harm to another person (and even then "harm" is fuzzy), neither am I. But what about those web sites you visited lately? Slashdot is known as attracting quite the subversive crowd. And I'm sure that there might be something suspicious about that lye you bought a few days ago. You bought a copy of Fight Club, I see. Well, well, you also have bought a copy of the hacker OS linux? On top of all that, your grandfather is Arab! This isn't good at all; clearly something is going down. In the best interests of preserving our liberty and tradition of small-government, I'm detaining you indefinity on suspicion of being a terrorist.
I know, this post should probably be scored -1, redundant, but I had to post it. It's not the collection of the information that's the bad thing, it's the amassing of information in the hands of the paranoid that will result from this anti-terrorist initiative.
Well, actually, it's impossible to get a perfect digital copy, because, as I understand it, the CD is unreadable at a few points to foil windblows-based rippers (even have a cd that won't rip under windbows, then it rips perfectly under linux, or a disk that windblows can't read or write to, but linux mounts it perfecty, or... anyway). In fact, I'd almost like to buy one of the copy-protected cds and give it a whirl on linux to see whether or not it is truely copy-protected.
When it comes right down to it, my mp3s are on a 60 gB reiserfs drive that doesn't even have a partition table (mkreiserfs/dev/hdd). There's no way they're getting though my mad ipchains and iptables and whatnot. When it comes right down to it, this is just helping Micro$oft shoot themselves in the foot with XP's weirdness, and it's not affecting those of us who are smart enough to switch over to GNU. To make a long story short, they're on crack if they think they have any enforcement here.
MAPS only maintains a database that provides information to others, who seek that information.That database expresses an opinion: in the opinion of MAPS, the networks listed in the database are suspected of passing through or generating spam.Shouldn't this be protected by the First Amendment?
The First Amendment is merely a bunch of words on a piece of paper. It can't protect anything. Instead, it is the people that protect their own liberties of free speech. What this decision means is that the people, unless they resist (which they won't), have allowed their government to become more of a corporate republic than a democratic republic.
Welcome to the Corporate States of America, where the corporate right to censor out trumps the individual right to press. In the year C.E. 1791, the people believed that every person had the right to speak and publish his mind freely, so they drafted and ratified the Bill of Rights as their supreme law of the land. The times have changed however. To become a valuable player in the world of fast-paced business, like those corporate-sponsored business classes promise you will become, you must become submissive to the will of the corporation you subscribe to. The Bill of Rights is antiquated by this new workplace, where it is common for people to think of employment as selling themselves to someone they hate, doing something they don't like, for a cause they don't approve of. In the Corporate States of America, the people don't believe in the right of free expression, so it atrophies and disappears like an unexercised muscle.
For Libertarians such as me, it is a very distressing thing to see such egalitarian fervor which was displayed at the outset of the United States of America wither into the Orwellian, business-driven culture expressed in that same country today. Unfortunatly, we Libertarians and egalitarian thinkers are a minority, and it seems as though, in the wake of September 11, our goals will be shattered by a powerful majority, whose corporations and sometimes families have been damaged by the unseen enemy. It seems futile to resist; sometimes I only wait until I am assymilated.
But I know that I won't be. I believe steadfastly in egalitarian Libertarianism, which forbids this kind of bullying by corporations against disinterested parties. Simply because some advertiser can buy law-expert whores shouldn't give them the right to censor an organization that can't buy the same whores to do battle. Apparently it does, because the judge is incompetent. The judge was appointed by a president who was incompetent. The president was elected by a people who are incompetent.
So Kazaa and Morpheus don't like people using client software written by somebody else and switch to a central authentication server to stop giFT from working.
Of course not. KaZaA, Morpheus, and Grokster are all ad-based services. Surely you remember the hoopla over Gator and other whatnot in KaZaA. Morpheus and Grokster also require the user to view ads. giFT does not. If a client like giFT extists that circumvents the Fasttrack money-making scheme of ad viewing, Fasttrack isn't going to like it. In fact, I have to side with the RIAA here, because the Fasttrack services were making money off of sharing of copyrighted material.
Is there an open version of the Fasttrack network? The idea of supernodes is an excellent modification of the Gnutella network. Gnutella, as everyone knows, scales horribly and has weak search capabilities, but still works. Why not create an open hybrid network like Fasttrack? Having a case against a decentralized network, as illustrated by the RIAA's timing, is nearly impossible. Gnutella 2, anyone?
America this, America that. Isn't this the same Uncle Sam that creates messes like the DMCA and SSSCA? Isn't this the same Uncle Sam that's trying to keep us all from using GPG and copy files? And now this Uncle Sam comes crawling back to us hackers and ask for us to help him?
Go ahead and mod me down, but it has to be said. Uncle Sam is not the entity to be helping. He's become old, senile, and tyrannical. If it we up to him, all hackers would be in jail! So instead he's giving us a choice: work for me or get labeled a terrorist. I think not. I don't know about other Slashdot readers, but I've about had it with these shenanigans.
I don't care if Uncle Sam wants to hunt me down, but I'm keeping my 31337 5k1Llz to myself. If I get drafted I'll move to Canada or get a sex change. (Why is it that only males are drafted?)
Anyway, I'm pissed. Uncle Sam can shove it where the sun don't shine.
Ok, MS is going to implement Hailstorm, which nobody asked for, nor do they want, and they're going to shove it down our throats along with Passport and take away our privacy and security. So Sun's reasoning is if we have a choice of being screwed by Sun or MS, we'll choose Sun.
But what they miss is that I'd just as soon be screwed by my girlfriend. Who says I have to buy anything on the internet anyhow?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care if you want to swear by the Linus kernel, but it gets killed by IO. I mean, come on, I'm using 2.4.12, and I can't rip a CD an play an MP3. Under the AC series, I can rip CDs, play MP3s, watch divx movies, surf the web, untar a file, and have a compile job going at the same time. Even for more usual setups, like viewing a video without doing anything else, the Linus kernel drops frames left and right, whereas the AC series laughs at it. Don't tell me I need to use mplayer with SDL, because I do.
Because I treat my Linux box as though it were a Windows box (one of the reason I switched over to Linux for everything is that the widgets in GTK are prettier than the widgets in Windows -- it's nice to have people ask me how to get their desktops to look like mine and tell them they have to install linux) and I expect it run at least as well as a Windows machine, I must use the AC series. While I'm sure that the Linus kernel has it's applications, it is simply unacceptable for replacing the Windows kernel.
Mod me flamebait or troll if you want, but I speak the truth. I have a Thunderbird-750 with 224 MB of ram, and I find it simply unacceptable when I can't run Quake or view movies under linux because of the Linus kernel. When mp3s skip because I'm moving some data around, it tells me that something is wrong with the Linus kernel. I'm glad that I had a friend who introduced me to the AC series, or I would have given up on linux. Plain and simple, politics aside, the end user doesn't care that he's being loyal to Linus the Great, he just cares that he can view that movie. If Windows outperforms linux in multimedia, he'll use Windows.
That's not my point: no one cares about Russian Programmers (stupid commies), College professors (probably brainwashing young people with their revisionist history), teenagers (damn teenagers they should all go the hell and die), and hackers (the media has spoken). No one in a majority has really been hurt by the DMCA yet, so nothing will happen. At this point, only bloody revolution will do anything, and that requires much more than a DMCA or even an SSSCA (although that might just do it, we'll have to see).
That's funny, because it won't make a difference. How many people out there who own an Aibo even knew that the site existed, much less were interested in using this guy's software? The reason that Sony can get away with bullying web sites and colleges is that no one cares. Let's face it: what damage has the DMCA really done? Why should anyone care about the DMCA? It really doesn't make a difference yet.
The DMCA's lack of affecting more than just the "information wants to be free" zealots, which is just a fringe group, is the reason that crap like this happens.
you just managed to articulate the blindingly obvious!
I know, it's a talent I'm developing with the help of my friend, Melandri-sensei, who is the Master of the Obvious.
Ok, isn't SafeSurf among the guys responsible for not letting me do research on breast cancer, transsexualism, gay rights, the second amendment, and drug abuse, among other things not suited for the children? Here are a few points:
Wasachu is an Iriquois (I think) word meaning "stealers of the fat." It was used by a lot of Indian (I forget the language, but Indian means "they who perservere") writers in my 10th grade high school English class.
If I type in "Jew" and use the thesarus should it provide "kike" or "mud-person"? Or how about if I put in "white" should it fill in "trailer-trash" or "cracker"? How about if I put in "gay" - how about "ass-master" or "faggot". Blacks? How about "nigger" or "one of those them there coloreds".
*Yes!* Like it or not, all those words and phrases are part of our language. If you don't want to use them, you don't have to. (To tell you the truth, I was called wasachu and whitie so many times by half-assed writers in my various English classes to not give a damn if someone get offended at nigger -- it's a word, you live with it.) It's up to us to decide whether we're above racist terms and ideas or merely ignorant of them. Ignorance won't make the problem go away, I can tell you that.
Those all mean the same thing, do they not? They all have the same meanings, don't they? Whats the big deal, right?
No! Does nigger == African? Does wasachu == European? No; each word has it's own connotation, meaning, and context. To suggest that all instances of horrible, wicked, nasty, etc., be replaced by bad, for example, is insane.
We should just give all cases of all words no matter what?
Yes! That's what a thesaurus is for!
Anything else is "1984" right?
Yes! That's *exactly* what happened in 1984! The changes were gradual, but they took place. Microsoft is not doing anyone a service here; rather they are doing us all a disservice by not trusting us to know our own language.
So? This just mean that Office XP is broken, and no one should use it. Open source needs to shove that down everyone's throat. I refuse to use broken software, which is why I stopped using Windows to begin with. I usually head for my paper thesaurus, so I don't know of any open source thesauri, but google gives me a link to WordNet.
We're not sure yet, what the effects of this law will be. Laws are often interpreted in odd ways. But even if dfreedom/dt is very small, it doesn't mean that it isn't negative. You know how to boil a frog, right? And we all know how there was no one left in Germany to be concerned for Pastor Niemoeller. Just remember that this war has no end in sight. You're acquainted with the oddities concerning the unwinnable drug war, right? Well, now we're fighting another unwinnable war, but it's against bad men this time. I think that given that light, a healthy bit of skepticism is in order.
I don't care what they do, whether they're javascript-happy or lynx zealots (if you want a text-based browser, use links at least -- it's multithreaded so you don't have all those horrible little pauses and it actually has the best download manager I've ever seen), but they must do it properly.
If the font tag is that great for you, use valid HTML 3.2, but I would recommend XHTML 1.0 and CSS. CSS has many advantages over the font tag and the like that are important, but I will omit for brevity. Needless to say, separating structure from apperance is good, because you can concentrate on making your page first, then making it look pretty later. In adition, if you've ever had to change many different font tags because you didn't like the size of your font, you'll be happy to know that CSS cascades so that you only have to set something else once, and every element under it changes likewise. Even then, I rarely use style like <span style="blah">, because simply specifying styles as classes works much better when I want to deviate for the style I've already set for whatever element I want to change.
Whether or not they can spell, I don't care, but please don't force browser writers to keep guessing at what the page author means by his mangeled html. It's very annoying and causes different browsers to do different things, which most people solve by using javascript detect scripts. Those are unneccesary, because if everyone would just adhere to the W3 standards and use CSS (which can do a lot of things that javascript is often used for), you wouldn't need all that junk.
Yes, I know, using vim to hand edit a page is a bit scary at first, but I will never understand people that claim to be able to write web pages, but have never seen html in their life, much less know what valid html looks like. The best part about editors like vim are, is that they support all version of html, javascript, etc., and are free.
Ok, so we've rated movies. Big deal. Parents let their kids see R movies all the time, and what male teenager hasn't seen a pr0n flic at his friend's house?
Ok, so we've rated games. Big deal. Parents let their kids play M rated games all the time, and what male teenager hasn't downloaded a pr0n-type game at his own house?
Ok, so we're rating web sites. Big deal. Parents'll let their kids view M rate web sites all the time, and what male teenager won't view a pr0n site in his room?
Rating content does virtually noting because everyone know that the censors are arbitrary. However, one negative effect of rating is the censorship itself. Movies have to cut back content all the time to just squeeze on less severe rating.
In spite of that otherwise lack of an effect, principle still argues against rating. Rating is essentially a for of censorship, because it tells people what to think of a movie in one letter before they talk to someone who can give them an essay of description. Any kind of censorship is bad, because it is ignorance. Because something is censored in a movie, doesn't make it go away. And of all the absurd things that Americans censor for! Why is it that American culture is so obsessed with locking sex, a fundamental aspect of life, in the closet, while it revels in killing of other human beings, which isn't necessary at all! Censorship, in America at least, because of the culture, turns movies into perversions of real life.
But, like I said, it's not like anyone will really listen to these ratings.
Does this surprise anyone else? If it does, shame on you for not being wary. You should know better; the NSA wasn't the end, ECHELON wasn't the end, Carnivore wasn't the end, and this won't be the end either. Anyway, I don't care if they put a box between my computer and the wall, because I use GPG for everything I don't want Big Brother to know.
I wonder if you could come up with a non-toxic ferrofluid, sneak it in someone's drink, then pull them around with a big huge magnet? Or even better... he's sure got an attractive personality
Ok, so ispell and derivitives aren't the best, but only because they need a larger vocabulary. But I've never ever had anything as strange as what happened Speedie happen. What the heck was the name of that word processor that I've never heard of before, Applixware? WTF is that? She should have been using Abiword or KWord at least. (I'll bet that she could have just as easily used vim -- she was probably only writing memos anyway.) The author of this article is a hopeless moron who is just trying to intimidate linux users into confroming to the Gates paradigm (gah! not that word!) of the future and into becoming mindless Microsoft drones. (Even then I don't understand what he's trying to do or what his motivation is here in sabotaging his own company, Redhat, like that.)
Well, it should be obvious to anyone that the problem is that they hired the comic book store owner, who, as we all should know from the Simpsons, knows nothing about embedded systems at all. Why were these people even using a comic book store as a reference anyway?! I mean, the guy can tell you why Aqua Man can't marry Wonder Woman, but as for embedded systems, what was the author of this story thinking?
Seriously though, as it's been pointed out before, this guy is far from a guru. A guru writes stuff that works; this guy doesn't, his "quirkiness" notwithstanding. I don't know about the rest of slashdotters, but I think the whole team-approach that's supposed to be the new "paradigm" (gah! there's that word again!) is a bunch of hooey. People aren't a bunch of lemmings, and, contrary to what the Man would have you think, one person with a MSCE or whatever does not equal another person with an MSCE or whatever. Every person is unique, and some people just have a knack for certain things. Sure, every person can learn programming, but very few ever reach guru-like wisdom. Not only is it unfair to people who have better skills to treat them as though they don't because they're in a "team," but it shortchanges the company in the end. If the gifted aren't recognized for their skills, they'll pack up and look for a place that does recognize them as something more than a means to an end.
Well, first of all, I'm an mtf transsexual and I think that naturally born women are a bunch of pampered whiners who really need learn a few lessons in toughness. But that's not my point in writing this.
Actually, I find spam amusing, so I set up an account just for recieving spam. If there is a site that won't let me in, or if I'm not sure about the party I'm giving my email to, I give them my spam account, and so far it's worked wonderfully. Only to people whom I have met in real life do I give my real email to. Besides, if it weren't for spam, we wouldn't know how to get those extra 3" on our dicks and increase our bust size two cups, ne?
eek. I'll have to work on my communication skills, because that's what I was trying to say. The United States culture is insane, so everything else about the United States is insane. German culture is mature and experienced, so everything else about Germany is mature. On thing I remember about being to Germany was how amazed everyone was about how easilly prozac and whatnot can be obtained in the US, but yet how a useful device like a Handi can cost so much. They also would rather save sex and "bad" language than violence. But, Americans live in a land of the free, so they'll turn a blind eye to anything their government does that proves contrary.
The problem with your point is that you're in Germany, not the land of the free. The fact that we're in the land of the free makes a national ID card that much more dangerous. People don't think, not here or in Germany, and if they have the impression that they live in the land of the free, they'll let the government get away with any number of oddities for great justice.
I went to Germany for three weeks this summer, and one thing I learned was that the United States culture is insane. Germans can have a national ID-type card because they haven't convinced themselves that, no matter what their government does, they live in a land of the free. The American have however, and that just lets their government do all sorts of strange things in the name of great justice. Maybe when American culture is as old as German culture, the Americans will be able to have an ID card. The American public will let their government create classes of thoughcriminals if they have national id cards, especially in the not entirely unwarranted paranoid state that they're in now.
That's what you think. By a strict definition of crime, that is, causing harm to another person (and even then "harm" is fuzzy), neither am I. But what about those web sites you visited lately? Slashdot is known as attracting quite the subversive crowd. And I'm sure that there might be something suspicious about that lye you bought a few days ago. You bought a copy of Fight Club, I see. Well, well, you also have bought a copy of the hacker OS linux? On top of all that, your grandfather is Arab! This isn't good at all; clearly something is going down. In the best interests of preserving our liberty and tradition of small-government, I'm detaining you indefinity on suspicion of being a terrorist.
I know, this post should probably be scored -1, redundant, but I had to post it. It's not the collection of the information that's the bad thing, it's the amassing of information in the hands of the paranoid that will result from this anti-terrorist initiative.
Well, actually, it's impossible to get a perfect digital copy, because, as I understand it, the CD is unreadable at a few points to foil windblows-based rippers (even have a cd that won't rip under windbows, then it rips perfectly under linux, or a disk that windblows can't read or write to, but linux mounts it perfecty, or... anyway). In fact, I'd almost like to buy one of the copy-protected cds and give it a whirl on linux to see whether or not it is truely copy-protected.
When it comes right down to it, my mp3s are on a 60 gB reiserfs drive that doesn't even have a partition table (mkreiserfs /dev/hdd). There's no way they're getting though my mad ipchains and iptables and whatnot. When it comes right down to it, this is just helping Micro$oft shoot themselves in the foot with XP's weirdness, and it's not affecting those of us who are smart enough to switch over to GNU. To make a long story short, they're on crack if they think they have any enforcement here.
The First Amendment is merely a bunch of words on a piece of paper. It can't protect anything. Instead, it is the people that protect their own liberties of free speech. What this decision means is that the people, unless they resist (which they won't), have allowed their government to become more of a corporate republic than a democratic republic.
Welcome to the Corporate States of America, where the corporate right to censor out trumps the individual right to press. In the year C.E. 1791, the people believed that every person had the right to speak and publish his mind freely, so they drafted and ratified the Bill of Rights as their supreme law of the land. The times have changed however. To become a valuable player in the world of fast-paced business, like those corporate-sponsored business classes promise you will become, you must become submissive to the will of the corporation you subscribe to. The Bill of Rights is antiquated by this new workplace, where it is common for people to think of employment as selling themselves to someone they hate, doing something they don't like, for a cause they don't approve of. In the Corporate States of America, the people don't believe in the right of free expression, so it atrophies and disappears like an unexercised muscle.
For Libertarians such as me, it is a very distressing thing to see such egalitarian fervor which was displayed at the outset of the United States of America wither into the Orwellian, business-driven culture expressed in that same country today. Unfortunatly, we Libertarians and egalitarian thinkers are a minority, and it seems as though, in the wake of September 11, our goals will be shattered by a powerful majority, whose corporations and sometimes families have been damaged by the unseen enemy. It seems futile to resist; sometimes I only wait until I am assymilated.
But I know that I won't be. I believe steadfastly in egalitarian Libertarianism, which forbids this kind of bullying by corporations against disinterested parties. Simply because some advertiser can buy law-expert whores shouldn't give them the right to censor an organization that can't buy the same whores to do battle. Apparently it does, because the judge is incompetent. The judge was appointed by a president who was incompetent. The president was elected by a people who are incompetent.
Of course not. KaZaA, Morpheus, and Grokster are all ad-based services. Surely you remember the hoopla over Gator and other whatnot in KaZaA. Morpheus and Grokster also require the user to view ads. giFT does not. If a client like giFT extists that circumvents the Fasttrack money-making scheme of ad viewing, Fasttrack isn't going to like it. In fact, I have to side with the RIAA here, because the Fasttrack services were making money off of sharing of copyrighted material.
Is there an open version of the Fasttrack network? The idea of supernodes is an excellent modification of the Gnutella network. Gnutella, as everyone knows, scales horribly and has weak search capabilities, but still works. Why not create an open hybrid network like Fasttrack? Having a case against a decentralized network, as illustrated by the RIAA's timing, is nearly impossible. Gnutella 2, anyone?
America this, America that. Isn't this the same Uncle Sam that creates messes like the DMCA and SSSCA? Isn't this the same Uncle Sam that's trying to keep us all from using GPG and copy files? And now this Uncle Sam comes crawling back to us hackers and ask for us to help him?
Go ahead and mod me down, but it has to be said. Uncle Sam is not the entity to be helping. He's become old, senile, and tyrannical. If it we up to him, all hackers would be in jail! So instead he's giving us a choice: work for me or get labeled a terrorist. I think not. I don't know about other Slashdot readers, but I've about had it with these shenanigans.
I don't care if Uncle Sam wants to hunt me down, but I'm keeping my 31337 5k1Llz to myself. If I get drafted I'll move to Canada or get a sex change. (Why is it that only males are drafted?)
Anyway, I'm pissed. Uncle Sam can shove it where the sun don't shine.
But what they miss is that I'd just as soon be screwed by my girlfriend. Who says I have to buy anything on the internet anyhow?