I agree, but I think you have missed my point; it doesn't matter to me whether government employees can read my email, what matters is what they are allowed to do with whatever information they glean from it.
No, I wouldn't post all my email on USENET, but it has nothing to do with trust. It would be a needless waste of time, bandwidth, and storage, and an annoyance to the other users of USENET to wade through my wife and I playfully argueing about who loves who more, or me politely informing a customer that the preventative maintenance schedule is on the last page of the documentation manual they received with the system. I personally don't care if my email ends up on USENET, but, out of respect for the other users, I wouldn't put it there myself.
Abuse of power is certainly a potential issue, but it's also covered by other laws. A shift in the balance of power (i.e. wanton abuse) would certainly concern me, but not the loss of a "right" (the right to not have my email read) that I never considered myself to have to begin with. The fact is anyone who really wants to can read my email, all I can do is slow them down by using encryption.
Where does the slippery slope begin? I don't know, but I don't believe it's here.
When Free Seech starts being attacked, let me know. Taking away my right to privacy doesn't take away my right to speak my mind. If I'm afraid to say what I think for fear that someone might hear it, then maybe I shouldn't be saying it at all.
Please, before you flame me, try to think of a specific example of a situation where a government entity knowing the contents of your email would actually be harmful or dangerous to you, and be prepared to defend that position intelligently.
Even though it's hard to find real potato vodka anymore (I only know of one brand that's still made with potatos) I wonder if the color of the mash would affect the color of the final distilled product?
Anyone around here ever made (or tried to make) vodka?
First of all, thank you for a reasoned, well thought out post. I'm especially glad that you brought up the question of American government agencies sponsoring terrorism as that is central to the current events, and unfortunately completely ignored in the debates. The fact is the America creates terrorists, both directly and indirectly by meddling in the affairs of other nations.
Before this sparks a flame war I want to say that I am an American and I consider myself a patriot. I think this is the greatest country in the world and I would gladly give my life to defend it. However, there are agencies of our government, the CIA in particular, which do evil in the world in our name and who's actions go largely unchecked, being hidden from public scrutiny under the guise of "National Security".
I realize that any nation needs intelligence and security, but I think it has been taken too far. "National Security" has been co-opted for too many private agendas. It is the policy of our government that secrets must be kept secret until anyone who could be held accountable for the horrific acts committed in while "protecting American interests" has died.
These agencies need to be opened to public scrutiny, and those who run them need to be held accountable for their actions, otherwise GWB's War on Terrorism will be just as successful (or, rather, unsuccessful) as his fathers War on Drugs, and, ironically, for the same reason. Here are some documented examples which illustrate my point. They are basically summarized from this book, and I encourage you to verify them for yourself.
First there was Vietnam. The grim truth is that we were basically there to defend the drug trade that the CIA inherited from the French secret service (I don't remember what they were called at the time). Most, if not all, of the puppet governemts we supported in South Vietnam were run by drug dealers. The money the CIA earned by selling their heroine on the streets of America funded their illicit operations in Combodia and Laos.
Then there was Afghanistan. The CIA once again used heroine, imported from and through Afghanistan to train and supply terrorists, including Osama bin Laden (sp?), to fight the Soviets. Again, these drugs were sold on the streets of America.
In South America the CIA discovered Cocaine, and again sold drugs on the streets of America to fund terrorist "freedom fighters", including the Contras and the Sandinistas. How do you think the drug cartels in Colombia got to be so powerful?
In short, the CIA has gotten us into one fucked situation after another around the world. They are Americas Evil Twin.
I knew a guy a few years ago who actually had an evil twin. His twin brother would go places and use his name and start shit with people. My friend was constantly finding himself permenantly banned from bars and nightclubs he had never been to before.
If anyone wants to know why people around the world, and especially in the Middle East, hate America so much, you need look no further than the CIA.
Suppose I rush off my own sequel to Harry Potter. Who owns my derived work? J K Rowlings. She as copyright holder owns the original work and has exclusive right to all derivative works.
Not true. You own your derived work, just as the many authors who have published works based on JRR Tolkiens works own the copyright to their works. The only way J K Rowlings could own the copyright to your derived work is if you produced it for her as a "work for hire", or you took her origional work and merely edited it. However, she would still own copyright on any passages you quoted from her origional work, which she could most likely use as leverage in a legal sense, and most likely the trademark on Harry Potter as well.
The reason Linus owns the copyright on the Linux kernel is that all existing versions of it are merely "edits" of the origional.
If you wanted too, you could create your own Unix work-alike based on what you've learned from Linux (note the distinction between knowledge and code) and call it "Linux 2001" and you would own the copyright on the code. The name, of course, is a different story because it falls under the domain of trademark, not copyright.
I highly recomend the Netgear broadband routers. I use the RT314 at home and I haven't had a single problem with it in approximately 6 months. I haven't even had to reboot it once. It doesn't show up on your netgear search, but it's basically the happy medium between the RT311 and the FR314 (4 ports, no censorware). It cost me about $130.
By contrast, my company uses the Linksys BEFSR11 and it seems to have some serious stability issues. We have to reboot it about once a week. Using the same modem in both circumstances, and they are 1/2 mile apart at the most, so I think it's safe to say that everything else is pretty much the same (a couple more computers at work, but it should be obvious with consumer level DSL and router that we're a pretty small company).
There really has been a world of difference between these 2 products in my experience. Constant reboots with the Linksys vs. not even one reboot with the Netgear. Those reboots really add up when you consider that a full reboot takes 10 minutes (to release the IP address), sometimes even longer since it never seems to work when I try to shortcut it and generally end up having to do a full reboot anyway. Of course, it seems even longer when the Purchaser, the President/CFO, and the General Manager are all standing over you saying "Is the internet working yet?" and the CEO is yelling "Why isn't my email working?" from his office...
I learned to program on MS and Borland IDEs and I much prefer the vi/gcc/gdb combo. I find the command line tools much easier to use because I have much more control, and therefore much better understanding of what's going on. Not that I don't use a GUI; I find it useful to have multiple terminals visible on the screen at one time.
Of course, I'm not really much of a programmer, and I haven't worked on any large projects, but I honestly can't see why I would want to go back to GUI based IDEs
Basically it seems like a rehash of every MS v Linux article, whether it's about OSs or apps. I do find it interesting that cnet doesn't think it's worth a link on their Linux page.
Basically, I think he's totally missed the point. That being that the vast majority of people don't use even half of the widgets MS Office provides them with. In my own experience I've found a lot of them to be extremely annoying. From a functionality standpoint, I'd say the only thing in StarOffice's way is lack of visibility. I had never heard of StarOffice until about a year ago when I first used Linux, and I only recently actually used it. Personally, I would rather use it than MS Office, especially after the frustrations I experienced trying to install Office 2k security patches over the weekend (How do I provide an O2k SR-1 cd when I installed SR-1 over the internet? Why won't my origional O2k cd suffice?). If I can functionally replace Excel and Word, I may even be able to sell my company on it. MS Project is the big one for us. If there's an open source app that can replace that (on Win2k, at least for now) then I'll have some real ammunition.
Are you a moron? Where did I say there shouldn't be laws? All I suggested was that the laws should not be based on religious belief, and the stem cell situation is a glaring example of why I believe that. We are dooming millions of people to die from cancer, parkinsons, etc for no better reason than that a few people have interpreted the bible as saying that we shouldn't allow research on stem cells. I think that's a stupid reason, and it certainly isn't beneficial to our society as a whole. It just makes some people feel good to force their morality on others, which is exactly what the doctrine Seperation of Church and State is supposed to prevent.
It's too bad that it means $60 million less dollars for a good and worthwile project, but it certainly makes a louder statement than he could have made by just holding a press conference saying he disagreed with our governments policy. I hope it gets tons of coverage.
What ever happened to seperation of church and state, anyway?
I'd be over to linux in a heartbeat if I had to pay for everything on my system. So I don't think that MS can claim that piracy isn't still helping them, at least in part.
ROTFL
I totally agree. The fact that I can get pirated MS software for free is the only reason I haven't switched to Linux entirely. It's mostly a matter of momentum and no longer having the time to play around that I did when I was learning Windows, but if I had to cough up cash for all that stuff I would find the time (or rather, it would be easier to convince my wife to give it to me).
At work it's a totally different scenario. My company is small and we can't afford to have everything properly licensed. It gives the General Manager fits. Recently we've grown to the point where we need to think about a real network infrastructure, and more imediately a dedicated fileserver. I've convinced my superiors to let me build the fileserver on Linux, and I'm hoping I can use that as a proof-of-concept to steer them away from Novell (with the aid of the price difference of course; $1500 + $70/additional user for Novell Small Business vs. $70 for SuSE Pro, not to mention the fact I can build it on the aging P-75 that no one wants to use rather than having to buy new hardware).
This is all well and good, but we're still locked in to Win2k for our desktop. Our CAD package, SolidWorks, is heavily tied to Excel, and everything else is done in Sage BusinessWorks, MS Project, and Quicken. If anyone has experience with getting any of these to work under Linux, preferably with as little non-free software as possible, I'd certainly appreciate some links or something. Also, I know that wine is supposed to work better if it has a windows install to pull.dlls from, can it do this over a network so I could have, say, one windows machine serving dlls to a bunch of Linux boxen?
As for the "article", it's worthless. Total pipe dream. If they'd at least named the company then maybe it would have been worth something, as it is I think Anandtech just needed to raise their page count for their advertisers and figured this was sure to get on/.'s front page.
Does anyone know where there is a list of companies that have switched for at least some applications? I know Mandrake has one, but it's not really in the list format I'm looking for and I really don't have time to wade through it. I'm hoping to find some "real" companies that I can point to and say "look, it works for them". No offense, but if I walk into my bosses office with a list of.coms and ISPs he's going to laugh at me.
This isn't the first time Intel has poored money into Linux. As I recall they put money into Red Hat about a year and a half ago. My memory is telling me it was around $150 million, but I don't always trust my memory...
Also, as I recall, SuSE was helping Intel port Linux to IA-64, so they already had a pretty solid working relationship.
I certainly did my best to support Lego through the 80's, and now my little brother has picked up the torch. At 11 he's already more than quadrupled my sizable collection, and my dad seems to have discovered them as well (other than with the sole of his foot in the dark, I mean) to the extent that he modified the cannons from the pirate ship to actually fire (I can post a description, maybe even some drawings if anyone is interested. It required some extra pieces which Lego sent him for free, apparently just because they thought it was cool. How's that for customer support?)
Anyway, I suppose I should respond to the article...
Among the reasons for Lego's "decline" (I have my doubts about that. They certainly seem to disappear from the shelves around christmas time...) they list TV. I don't know how many fellow slashdotters have had the opportunity to watch any childrens TV lately, but it's really taken a dive in the last 10 years or so. It's basically just a bunch of touchy-feely, polotically correct garbage. It isn't even entertaining (mind you, I don't know what's on Nicolodean or the Cartoon Network these days, just the free channels). As far as I can tell, nothing descent has been produced since Animaniacs. The most entertaining kids show I've seen recently is Teletubbies, which is disturbingly surreal. My 1 year old daughter loves it though, which really makes me wonder about the perceptual world babies and toddlers live in...
I guess my point is, how can this crap compete with Lego, except by numbing the childs mind to the point where independent creative thought is impossible? And what are the ultimate effects on these children when they grow up?
As long as kids have relatives that think creativity is important, Lego will will always have a market. So what if they haven't been in the top twenty toys for the last x years, it's better to have a sustained market than to be a flash in the pan, despite corporate America's obsession with quick profits. How many little brothers will have even a passing interest in just one of those top 20 toys?
I've been using msconfig in Win98 for a couple years now and it works great. I don't even use tweakUI or any of the similar utilities out there anymore since msconfig provides all the functionality I used from them and more. If you're checking it out, you should take a look under the Advanced button on the main tab, among other things you can configure win98 to use more than 256M RAM. It's really a great utility.
Anyone know where I can find an equivalent for win2k?
Thank you for seeing my point. If I'm not actually doing anything wrong and they kick me out because of some computer mismatch (or even a true match, remember that I'm not doing anything wrong) then they are discriminating against me. I kinda hope it happens, I could use the money. Too bad the nearest Borders is 50 miles away...
I discovered some great artists on mp3.com and even bought some CD's. One thing I've learned in my old age is that the best way to make sure that what you like is available is to pay the people who bring it to you (that doesn't mean I'm willing to pay the outrageous prices that the big labels charge, but the vast majority of what they put out is crap that I don't want anyway). I personally thought mp3.com was doing a great thing, and if I ever bothered to record anything I probably would have released it into the wild through them.
However, there are a lot of "artists" out there who are only in it for the money and see mp3.com as an easy target right now. I can picture them in my mind, as I've played with plenty of them. It always seemed like a really sad life to me.
...IBM is willing to share what it has learned from AIX with the Linux community. I haven't spent much time crawling around IBMs developer page, so I don't know what's there, but I would say that if they're really serious about Open Source, then they should release the source for AIX. That is certainly the fastest way to bring Linux up to spead for the kind of applications AIX is especially suited for.
In fact, every game I have bought or played in the last 4 years has had the option to run in OpenGL, although they certainly use DirectX for everything else (except EAX for sound in some games). I would say that most games say DirectX on the box because there is some incentive for it. If there were incentive for them to say OpenGL on the box they probably would.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I wouldn't post all my email on USENET, but it has nothing to do with trust. It would be a needless waste of time, bandwidth, and storage, and an annoyance to the other users of USENET to wade through my wife and I playfully argueing about who loves who more, or me politely informing a customer that the preventative maintenance schedule is on the last page of the documentation manual they received with the system. I personally don't care if my email ends up on USENET, but, out of respect for the other users, I wouldn't put it there myself.
Abuse of power is certainly a potential issue, but it's also covered by other laws. A shift in the balance of power (i.e. wanton abuse) would certainly concern me, but not the loss of a "right" (the right to not have my email read) that I never considered myself to have to begin with. The fact is anyone who really wants to can read my email, all I can do is slow them down by using encryption.
Where does the slippery slope begin? I don't know, but I don't believe it's here.
Please, before you flame me, try to think of a specific example of a situation where a government entity knowing the contents of your email would actually be harmful or dangerous to you, and be prepared to defend that position intelligently.
Anyone around here ever made (or tried to make) vodka?
Before this sparks a flame war I want to say that I am an American and I consider myself a patriot. I think this is the greatest country in the world and I would gladly give my life to defend it. However, there are agencies of our government, the CIA in particular, which do evil in the world in our name and who's actions go largely unchecked, being hidden from public scrutiny under the guise of "National Security".
I realize that any nation needs intelligence and security, but I think it has been taken too far. "National Security" has been co-opted for too many private agendas. It is the policy of our government that secrets must be kept secret until anyone who could be held accountable for the horrific acts committed in while "protecting American interests" has died.
These agencies need to be opened to public scrutiny, and those who run them need to be held accountable for their actions, otherwise GWB's War on Terrorism will be just as successful (or, rather, unsuccessful) as his fathers War on Drugs, and, ironically, for the same reason. Here are some documented examples which illustrate my point. They are basically summarized from this book, and I encourage you to verify them for yourself.
First there was Vietnam. The grim truth is that we were basically there to defend the drug trade that the CIA inherited from the French secret service (I don't remember what they were called at the time). Most, if not all, of the puppet governemts we supported in South Vietnam were run by drug dealers. The money the CIA earned by selling their heroine on the streets of America funded their illicit operations in Combodia and Laos.
Then there was Afghanistan. The CIA once again used heroine, imported from and through Afghanistan to train and supply terrorists, including Osama bin Laden (sp?), to fight the Soviets. Again, these drugs were sold on the streets of America.
In South America the CIA discovered Cocaine, and again sold drugs on the streets of America to fund terrorist "freedom fighters", including the Contras and the Sandinistas. How do you think the drug cartels in Colombia got to be so powerful?
In short, the CIA has gotten us into one fucked situation after another around the world. They are Americas Evil Twin.
I knew a guy a few years ago who actually had an evil twin. His twin brother would go places and use his name and start shit with people. My friend was constantly finding himself permenantly banned from bars and nightclubs he had never been to before.
If anyone wants to know why people around the world, and especially in the Middle East, hate America so much, you need look no further than the CIA.
Not true. You own your derived work, just as the many authors who have published works based on JRR Tolkiens works own the copyright to their works. The only way J K Rowlings could own the copyright to your derived work is if you produced it for her as a "work for hire", or you took her origional work and merely edited it. However, she would still own copyright on any passages you quoted from her origional work, which she could most likely use as leverage in a legal sense, and most likely the trademark on Harry Potter as well.
The reason Linus owns the copyright on the Linux kernel is that all existing versions of it are merely "edits" of the origional.
If you wanted too, you could create your own Unix work-alike based on what you've learned from Linux (note the distinction between knowledge and code) and call it "Linux 2001" and you would own the copyright on the code. The name, of course, is a different story because it falls under the domain of trademark, not copyright.
By contrast, my company uses the Linksys BEFSR11 and it seems to have some serious stability issues. We have to reboot it about once a week. Using the same modem in both circumstances, and they are 1/2 mile apart at the most, so I think it's safe to say that everything else is pretty much the same (a couple more computers at work, but it should be obvious with consumer level DSL and router that we're a pretty small company).
There really has been a world of difference between these 2 products in my experience. Constant reboots with the Linksys vs. not even one reboot with the Netgear. Those reboots really add up when you consider that a full reboot takes 10 minutes (to release the IP address), sometimes even longer since it never seems to work when I try to shortcut it and generally end up having to do a full reboot anyway. Of course, it seems even longer when the Purchaser, the President/CFO, and the General Manager are all standing over you saying "Is the internet working yet?" and the CEO is yelling "Why isn't my email working?" from his office...
silly me...
Of course, I'm not really much of a programmer, and I haven't worked on any large projects, but I honestly can't see why I would want to go back to GUI based IDEs
Basically, I think he's totally missed the point. That being that the vast majority of people don't use even half of the widgets MS Office provides them with. In my own experience I've found a lot of them to be extremely annoying. From a functionality standpoint, I'd say the only thing in StarOffice's way is lack of visibility. I had never heard of StarOffice until about a year ago when I first used Linux, and I only recently actually used it. Personally, I would rather use it than MS Office, especially after the frustrations I experienced trying to install Office 2k security patches over the weekend (How do I provide an O2k SR-1 cd when I installed SR-1 over the internet? Why won't my origional O2k cd suffice?). If I can functionally replace Excel and Word, I may even be able to sell my company on it. MS Project is the big one for us. If there's an open source app that can replace that (on Win2k, at least for now) then I'll have some real ammunition.
An Outlook style addressbook is a must as well...
Perhaps you're unemployed because you're not that bright?
What ever happened to seperation of church and state, anyway?
ROTFL
I totally agree. The fact that I can get pirated MS software for free is the only reason I haven't switched to Linux entirely. It's mostly a matter of momentum and no longer having the time to play around that I did when I was learning Windows, but if I had to cough up cash for all that stuff I would find the time (or rather, it would be easier to convince my wife to give it to me).
At work it's a totally different scenario. My company is small and we can't afford to have everything properly licensed. It gives the General Manager fits. Recently we've grown to the point where we need to think about a real network infrastructure, and more imediately a dedicated fileserver. I've convinced my superiors to let me build the fileserver on Linux, and I'm hoping I can use that as a proof-of-concept to steer them away from Novell (with the aid of the price difference of course; $1500 + $70/additional user for Novell Small Business vs. $70 for SuSE Pro, not to mention the fact I can build it on the aging P-75 that no one wants to use rather than having to buy new hardware).
This is all well and good, but we're still locked in to Win2k for our desktop. Our CAD package, SolidWorks, is heavily tied to Excel, and everything else is done in Sage BusinessWorks, MS Project, and Quicken. If anyone has experience with getting any of these to work under Linux, preferably with as little non-free software as possible, I'd certainly appreciate some links or something. Also, I know that wine is supposed to work better if it has a windows install to pull
As for the "article", it's worthless. Total pipe dream. If they'd at least named the company then maybe it would have been worth something, as it is I think Anandtech just needed to raise their page count for their advertisers and figured this was sure to get on
Does anyone know where there is a list of companies that have switched for at least some applications? I know Mandrake has one, but it's not really in the list format I'm looking for and I really don't have time to wade through it. I'm hoping to find some "real" companies that I can point to and say "look, it works for them". No offense, but if I walk into my bosses office with a list of
This isn't the first time Intel has poored money into Linux. As I recall they put money into Red Hat about a year and a half ago. My memory is telling me it was around $150 million, but I don't always trust my memory...
Also, as I recall, SuSE was helping Intel port Linux to IA-64, so they already had a pretty solid working relationship.
Anyway, I suppose I should respond to the article...
Among the reasons for Lego's "decline" (I have my doubts about that. They certainly seem to disappear from the shelves around christmas time...) they list TV. I don't know how many fellow slashdotters have had the opportunity to watch any childrens TV lately, but it's really taken a dive in the last 10 years or so. It's basically just a bunch of touchy-feely, polotically correct garbage. It isn't even entertaining (mind you, I don't know what's on Nicolodean or the Cartoon Network these days, just the free channels). As far as I can tell, nothing descent has been produced since Animaniacs. The most entertaining kids show I've seen recently is Teletubbies, which is disturbingly surreal. My 1 year old daughter loves it though, which really makes me wonder about the perceptual world babies and toddlers live in...
I guess my point is, how can this crap compete with Lego, except by numbing the childs mind to the point where independent creative thought is impossible? And what are the ultimate effects on these children when they grow up?
As long as kids have relatives that think creativity is important, Lego will will always have a market. So what if they haven't been in the top twenty toys for the last x years, it's better to have a sustained market than to be a flash in the pan, despite corporate America's obsession with quick profits. How many little brothers will have even a passing interest in just one of those top 20 toys?
Anyone know where I can find an equivalent for win2k?
However, there are a lot of "artists" out there who are only in it for the money and see mp3.com as an easy target right now. I can picture them in my mind, as I've played with plenty of them. It always seemed like a really sad life to me.