Good software or not, I think those guys need to re-evaluate their business plan. I can't imagine releasing something as shareware and charging $300 for registration, that's seriously absurd! Then again, I'm a Linux user, so maybe I'm just spoiled...
Granted, the argument has been made that "using" software necessarily involves copying it -- but IIRC, some recent laws have clarified that argument out of existance.
Correct, those copies, as well as backup copies, are specifically protected in federal copyright law.
Basically, your problem has no solution. As has already been pointed out, there's no such thing as "hack-proof", the full version WILL end up on warez sites, and shareware rarely makes money. In the end you just have to trust in human nature. It's hard to believe, I know, but most people don't get their software from warez sites. In fact, most people prefer to do the "right thing" in most situations.
Don't waste time, effort, and resources trying to make your software "hack-proof", spend that time instead on making more reasons for someone in a store pick your box up off the shelf.
People want to write notes and papers, manage their finances, watch a movie or video, play a game online, and listen to some music.
Computer geeks want granular control, resizing sliders, left hand whump widgets, whatever. Unfortunately, the geeks are controlling this debate right now and ensuring that people will not get to use Linux in the numbers they should be.
I'm a computer geek, and I don't give a rat's ass about any of those things you think I want granular control over. I want to do all that other stuff that "normal" people want to do.
What I want also is the ability for my wife (who is not technically inclined in any sense) and I to each be able to choose the environment that works best for us. I like WindowMaker, my wife likes KDE. Those are the environments that WE feel fit the way we think and the way we prefer to work best. Indeed, both of us ARE able to do all those things in our chosen environments.
To not leverage the fact that a modern computer allows that kind of flexibility is stupid. To say that it must be the same for everyone is stupid, and ignores the basic fact that everyone is not the same. I think the people who keep suggesting this need to wake up and realize that there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all intuitive interface, that there is in fact no such thing as a truely intuitive interface at all. That guy who said that the nipple is the only intuitive interface was wrong: breastfeeding is learned, by both mother and infant (go ahead and ask someone who's actually done it about those first few days).
What this all means is that everyone has different experiences and different personalities, and therefor different things will seem intuitive to them and different environments will be more comfortable. Many people love the Mac GUI and consider it the apex of GUI design; I find it irritating, backwards, and unweildly. OTOH, I find assembly language fairly intuitive, and I think we all know how most people feel about that.
I work in a customer service repair center. How busy I am is pretty easy to point out most of the time (carts loaded with customer owned servers and a clipboard full of printed requests for individual boards from the planners), so I haven't had to go to the extreme of MS Project, but I find the organization of my bay is quite useful in those kind of situations. I can point to that carts and ask that the requestor pick which customer's job they'd like to push back. I do the best I can, and I think I've proven that, so when I do have to say no people generally accept it.
Of course, now that the only other repair tech that supported my product quit, I generally reply with either "Good luck on that, I hope it works out for you" or "It's in the queue!", depending on the level of management I'm dealing with.
Technically speaking, a hydrogen bomb's only purpose is to release a large amount of energy over a very short period of time. Your purpose with an h-bomb may be to destroy population centers, but my purpose with an h-bomb is: 1: To remove unwanted islands. 2: To create jobs by opening naval positions. 3: To promote world peace by reducing the number of naval vessels.
Even if you use your gun to shingle your roof like the guy in that Far Side cartoon, that doesn't change the fact that the purpose of a gun is violence. That is it's intended use, and it's reflected in every one of the examples you give.
no shooting ranges where you live? i regularly have fun with my firearms. all the while commiting no act of violence. (unless all the poor broken bottles count)
Just because nobody cares about your target doesn't make it a non-violent act.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not condeming it! I've certainly done plenty of violent, destructive things that did no harm to people or property, and I think that can be a very important outlet at times, but I don't delude myself about the nature of what I'm doing.
I'm a democrat, and I'm not anti-gun. (I don't own one myself, but I support your right to own one)
Most programmer, even with bad tempers don't write viruses; why should a gun nut with a bad temper be considered violent?
A computer, while it can certainly can be put to anti-social use, is not a tool of violence. Even in the worst circumstances it's highly unlikely that anyone will be injured or killed as a result of using a computer in anger.
A gun, on the other hand, has no other purpose than violence.
Got to the end of Half-Life without cheating... except for the final monster. For me the payoff is working out how to get throught the game, so when it looked like I was at the end with just the last boss to beat I would look up (carefully) a walkthrough to see if I was indeed at the last boss. I don't very much care what happened after that so I never did finish the game.
That's unfortunate. IMHO the final monster in Half-life is one of the most clever, well designed parts of the game, and the ending is a fantastic final twist on an already twisted story.
But if they keep ranting, surely it could be installed...
Assuming it's been ported. (I honestly don't know, I don't use it.) That's a big reason why I decided to actually learn the standard tools like find and vi, rather than their more "user friendly" analogues.
Or, perhaps you could make a shell script of `find' that takes their perameters, then runs the normal `find' with `2>/dev/null' on the end.
Those are just ideas that pop up. I'm sure you can find (no pun intended) some solution to the problem other than giving them root access.
You could also make all your directories searchable. My solution would be to just say "No, you can't have root access. Sack up and learn to use your tools."
On a related note: if they feel `2>/dev/null' is too much work, then they obviously haven't been indoctrinated into the Unix culture yet. It's important that you manage to somehow do this as quickly as possible. Until you do, they will find quibble after quibble to rant over: "vi doesn't work right--I can't copy/paste!!--windoze key don't work" etc, etc.
You make an excellent point: I thought these guys were supposed to be Unix developers! They don't know it well enough to not have to base their finds at/?
My little brother (13) learned the evil of cheat codes when he finally tried playing Starcraft online. I've always been anti-cheatcode, and I tried to explain why to him, but he's one of those people who has to learn it on his own. The lesson he learned is: if you always use cheat codes you'll never actually get good at the game. That's fine if all you ever do is play on your own just for something to do, I guess. My own feeling is that you're just cheating yourself, though.
That said, I have used cheats, but just to get around bugs in a game. For instance last time I played through Half-life there were a couple places where there were barriers that for some reason you just couldn't get around (one was an elevator where no matter where you stood you'd get 'stuck' when it transitioned to the next map, the other was a wall that was supposed to blow up but didn't, I had to use a walk-through-walls cheat to get through them). They do have their place...
Another good way to do it is to charge for institutions of higher learning for CA high school grads. Only a few actually do it, whereas any UC school gets you free education.
What the hell are you talking about? UCs may not be as expensive, but they certainly aren't free.
uh, where are you that it's $400? Did you pay it late? I run a web hosting business out of my house (20 assorted computers, plus switches/routers..) and my PG&E bill hasn't been over $220 all year. Summer included.
My PG&E bill for my poorly insulated appartment in Grass Valley regularly reaches $400 a month in the winter. The last couple of bills have been more in the $100 range, but mostly because we were suffering from a broken swamp cooler.
To turn the question around: if you can come up with a supportable, non-religion-based argument as to why the definition of marriage should be expanded to include gays, I'd be perfectly willing to consider it.
I have to agree with the poster's comments on the hydrogen economy. I just don't understand where the power is supposed to come from.
Solar?
I lived in an off-grid solar powered home for over half my life, and the only real problem is storage. We used big lead-acid batteries for that, but it seems to me that fuel cells would be better. We also had a generator for times when the weather was bad for more than a day or two, but again, a good, cheap storage solution would have removed that need as well, particularly one with long-term storage capability. Our panels produced far more power during the summer than we had the capacity to store, and even if we had the capacity, long-term storage would still have been an issue.
Obviously it isn't a viable solution for everyone everywhere, but based on my experience it's be worth looking into for at least half of the country. I think you dismiss solar too quickly, especially considering that you also name conservation as an important source. Surely local generation is more efficient in terms of line loss and reduced burden on the grid as a whole.
Davis could have gone to the federal gov't for help AT THAT TIME
He DID, and FERC, at the behest of GWB, basically said "Fuck you!" That was well before any long term contracts were signed.
Um, negotiated a bit better or declare AT THAT POINT we were under gunpoint,
Again, he DID.
NOT declare that this was a great deal
It WAS a great deal compared with what we HAD, just like giving a mugger your wallet is a great deal when compared to being shot in the head.
then after signing the contract going to the feds for help. It generally doesn't help when you sign a contract and then cry about it after the fact.
So, since your agreement to give a mugger your wallet in exchange for not being shot in the head could be considered a verbal contract, you shouldn't then go to the police and report that you've been mugged? Do I need to remind you that everything Davis accused Enron of has been proven true?
Your ignorance of such recent history would be truely astounding if this recall election hadn't proven how prevelant it is.
How about declaring a state of emergency, siezing the power plants, and throwing the power plant execs in jail?
He tried to do that, or rather, he tried to get FERC to do that, since most of those energy corporations were not in California and thus it had to be done on the federal level. Not suprisingly, GWB sided with his Texas energy buddies and said "up yours, California!"
I'm sure that decision had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Davis was considered his prime opponent for the next presidential election.
Funny how it comes right back to the Republicans, isn't it...
At the same time, see the Declaration of Independence - "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights".
The Declaration of Independence, while certainly historically significant, is NOT a legal document of the United States of America. The Constitution IS, as is the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli which quite clearly states that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." (That treaty, BTW, was written under Washington, and unanimously approved by the Senate under John Adams).
Even if the DoI were law, it would have been superceded by both of those documents on this count.
It should also be noted that Jefferson, when crafting the DoI, specifically chose religiously generic language in hopes of avoiding precisely the arguement you are trying to make.
From what is the legal definition of marriage derived?
What the current definition of marriage is or where it came from is irrelevant. As long as marriage is a legal institution it must be non-descriminatory with regards to race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, etc.
Perhaps this should be rephrased as "gay civil unions". Then the hot button 'marriage' wouldn't be in there.
Civil union and marriage are not legally equivalent. If they were we might not be having this discussion at all, since gays already have civil union rights in many states, and those civil unions would have to be recognized by by the rest. Civil union is, at most, a foot in the door, so calling it a simple rephrasing is dishonest.
If you can come up with a supportable, non-religion-based (in other words: not unconstitutional) arguement for why gays should be denied the right to be married, I'm perfectly willing to consider it.
Here's the thing: marriage in America is not a religious institution, it is a legal institution. As such, because of the doctrine of seperation of church and state, to deny gay couples the right to be married because "the Bible says so" is more than illegal; it is unconstitutional.
If you can come up with a different arguement, fine, but this one has been legally invalid for over 200 years.
There's a reason this gets posted every time hydrogen gets mentioned: people still believe that it was the hydrogen that caused the fire, and that simply isn't true.
If the Hindenburg had used helium instead the fire might not have been so catastrophic. I'll give you that. But, if they had used a different paint to paint the skin, they wouldn't have ended up with a composition which is essentially solid rocket fuel, and the fire might not have happened at all.
The hydrogen wasn't the problem, it was the fact that the skin was made of solid rocket fuel. It was actually the skin that was burning, since hydrogen burns so hot you can't see the flames.
Slashdot Mirror
Yikes!
Good software or not, I think those guys need to re-evaluate their business plan. I can't imagine releasing something as shareware and charging $300 for registration, that's seriously absurd! Then again, I'm a Linux user, so maybe I'm just spoiled...
Are you saying that clicking the "I Agree" button is an involuntary action?
Maybe he has Parkinson's or Tourett's (sp?).
Granted, the argument has been made that "using" software necessarily involves copying it -- but IIRC, some recent laws have clarified that argument out of existance.
Correct, those copies, as well as backup copies, are specifically protected in federal copyright law.
Basically, your problem has no solution. As has already been pointed out, there's no such thing as "hack-proof", the full version WILL end up on warez sites, and shareware rarely makes money. In the end you just have to trust in human nature. It's hard to believe, I know, but most people don't get their software from warez sites. In fact, most people prefer to do the "right thing" in most situations.
Don't waste time, effort, and resources trying to make your software "hack-proof", spend that time instead on making more reasons for someone in a store pick your box up off the shelf.
People want to write notes and papers, manage their finances, watch a movie or video, play a game online, and listen to some music.
Computer geeks want granular control, resizing sliders, left hand whump widgets, whatever. Unfortunately, the geeks are controlling this debate right now and ensuring that people will not get to use Linux in the numbers they should be.
I'm a computer geek, and I don't give a rat's ass about any of those things you think I want granular control over. I want to do all that other stuff that "normal" people want to do.
What I want also is the ability for my wife (who is not technically inclined in any sense) and I to each be able to choose the environment that works best for us. I like WindowMaker, my wife likes KDE. Those are the environments that WE feel fit the way we think and the way we prefer to work best. Indeed, both of us ARE able to do all those things in our chosen environments.
To not leverage the fact that a modern computer allows that kind of flexibility is stupid. To say that it must be the same for everyone is stupid, and ignores the basic fact that everyone is not the same. I think the people who keep suggesting this need to wake up and realize that there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all intuitive interface, that there is in fact no such thing as a truely intuitive interface at all. That guy who said that the nipple is the only intuitive interface was wrong: breastfeeding is learned, by both mother and infant (go ahead and ask someone who's actually done it about those first few days).
What this all means is that everyone has different experiences and different personalities, and therefor different things will seem intuitive to them and different environments will be more comfortable. Many people love the Mac GUI and consider it the apex of GUI design; I find it irritating, backwards, and unweildly. OTOH, I find assembly language fairly intuitive, and I think we all know how most people feel about that.
Excellent advice!
I work in a customer service repair center. How busy I am is pretty easy to point out most of the time (carts loaded with customer owned servers and a clipboard full of printed requests for individual boards from the planners), so I haven't had to go to the extreme of MS Project, but I find the organization of my bay is quite useful in those kind of situations. I can point to that carts and ask that the requestor pick which customer's job they'd like to push back. I do the best I can, and I think I've proven that, so when I do have to say no people generally accept it.
Of course, now that the only other repair tech that supported my product quit, I generally reply with either "Good luck on that, I hope it works out for you" or "It's in the queue!", depending on the level of management I'm dealing with.
Hurray for bullshit semantics!
Technically speaking, a hydrogen bomb's only purpose is to release a large amount of energy over a very short period of time. Your purpose with an h-bomb may be to destroy population centers, but my purpose with an h-bomb is:
1: To remove unwanted islands.
2: To create jobs by opening naval positions.
3: To promote world peace by reducing the number of naval vessels.
Even if you use your gun to shingle your roof like the guy in that Far Side cartoon, that doesn't change the fact that the purpose of a gun is violence. That is it's intended use, and it's reflected in every one of the examples you give.
no shooting ranges where you live?
i regularly have fun with my firearms.
all the while commiting no act of violence.
(unless all the poor broken bottles count)
Just because nobody cares about your target doesn't make it a non-violent act.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not condeming it! I've certainly done plenty of violent, destructive things that did no harm to people or property, and I think that can be a very important outlet at times, but I don't delude myself about the nature of what I'm doing.
You must be a democrat.
I'm a democrat, and I'm not anti-gun. (I don't own one myself, but I support your right to own one)
Most programmer, even with bad tempers don't write viruses; why should a gun nut with a bad temper be considered violent?
A computer, while it can certainly can be put to anti-social use, is not a tool of violence. Even in the worst circumstances it's highly unlikely that anyone will be injured or killed as a result of using a computer in anger.
A gun, on the other hand, has no other purpose than violence.
Got to the end of Half-Life without cheating... except for the final monster. For me the payoff is working out how to get throught the game, so when it looked like I was at the end with just the last boss to beat I would look up (carefully) a walkthrough to see if I was indeed at the last boss. I don't very much care what happened after that so I never did finish the game.
That's unfortunate. IMHO the final monster in Half-life is one of the most clever, well designed parts of the game, and the ending is a fantastic final twist on an already twisted story.
But if they keep ranting, surely it could be installed...
/?
Assuming it's been ported. (I honestly don't know, I don't use it.) That's a big reason why I decided to actually learn the standard tools like find and vi, rather than their more "user friendly" analogues.
Or, perhaps you could make a shell script of `find' that takes their perameters, then runs the normal `find' with `2>/dev/null' on the end.
Those are just ideas that pop up. I'm sure you can find (no pun intended) some solution to the problem other than giving them root access.
You could also make all your directories searchable. My solution would be to just say "No, you can't have root access. Sack up and learn to use your tools."
On a related note: if they feel `2>/dev/null' is too much work, then they obviously haven't been indoctrinated into the Unix culture yet. It's important that you manage to somehow do this as quickly as possible. Until you do, they will find quibble after quibble to rant over: "vi doesn't work right--I can't copy/paste!!--windoze key don't work" etc, etc.
You make an excellent point: I thought these guys were supposed to be Unix developers! They don't know it well enough to not have to base their finds at
My little brother (13) learned the evil of cheat codes when he finally tried playing Starcraft online. I've always been anti-cheatcode, and I tried to explain why to him, but he's one of those people who has to learn it on his own. The lesson he learned is: if you always use cheat codes you'll never actually get good at the game. That's fine if all you ever do is play on your own just for something to do, I guess. My own feeling is that you're just cheating yourself, though.
That said, I have used cheats, but just to get around bugs in a game. For instance last time I played through Half-life there were a couple places where there were barriers that for some reason you just couldn't get around (one was an elevator where no matter where you stood you'd get 'stuck' when it transitioned to the next map, the other was a wall that was supposed to blow up but didn't, I had to use a walk-through-walls cheat to get through them). They do have their place...
locate is hardly a standard feature in the Unix world.
I already have a couple of Athlon systems.
Yes, it really is that poorly insulated...
Another good way to do it is to charge for institutions of higher learning for CA high school grads. Only a few actually do it, whereas any UC school gets you free education.
What the hell are you talking about? UCs may not be as expensive, but they certainly aren't free.
uh, where are you that it's $400? Did you pay it late? I run a web hosting business out of my house (20 assorted computers, plus switches/routers..) and my PG&E bill hasn't been over $220 all year. Summer included.
My PG&E bill for my poorly insulated appartment in Grass Valley regularly reaches $400 a month in the winter. The last couple of bills have been more in the $100 range, but mostly because we were suffering from a broken swamp cooler.
To turn the question around: if you can come up with a supportable, non-religion-based argument as to why the definition of marriage should be expanded to include gays, I'd be perfectly willing to consider it.
Because excluding them is unconstitutional.
I have to agree with the poster's comments on the hydrogen economy. I just don't understand where the power is supposed to come from.
Solar?
I lived in an off-grid solar powered home for over half my life, and the only real problem is storage. We used big lead-acid batteries for that, but it seems to me that fuel cells would be better. We also had a generator for times when the weather was bad for more than a day or two, but again, a good, cheap storage solution would have removed that need as well, particularly one with long-term storage capability. Our panels produced far more power during the summer than we had the capacity to store, and even if we had the capacity, long-term storage would still have been an issue.
Obviously it isn't a viable solution for everyone everywhere, but based on my experience it's be worth looking into for at least half of the country. I think you dismiss solar too quickly, especially considering that you also name conservation as an important source. Surely local generation is more efficient in terms of line loss and reduced burden on the grid as a whole.
Davis could have gone to the federal gov't for help AT THAT TIME
He DID, and FERC, at the behest of GWB, basically said "Fuck you!" That was well before any long term contracts were signed.
Um, negotiated a bit better or declare AT THAT POINT we were under gunpoint,
Again, he DID.
NOT declare that this was a great deal
It WAS a great deal compared with what we HAD, just like giving a mugger your wallet is a great deal when compared to being shot in the head.
then after signing the contract going to the feds for help. It generally doesn't help when you sign a contract and then cry about it after the fact.
So, since your agreement to give a mugger your wallet in exchange for not being shot in the head could be considered a verbal contract, you shouldn't then go to the police and report that you've been mugged? Do I need to remind you that everything Davis accused Enron of has been proven true?
Your ignorance of such recent history would be truely astounding if this recall election hadn't proven how prevelant it is.
How about declaring a state of emergency, siezing the power plants, and throwing the power plant execs in jail?
He tried to do that, or rather, he tried to get FERC to do that, since most of those energy corporations were not in California and thus it had to be done on the federal level. Not suprisingly, GWB sided with his Texas energy buddies and said "up yours, California!"
I'm sure that decision had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Davis was considered his prime opponent for the next presidential election.
Funny how it comes right back to the Republicans, isn't it...
At the same time, see the Declaration of Independence - "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights".
The Declaration of Independence, while certainly historically significant, is NOT a legal document of the United States of America. The Constitution IS, as is the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli which quite clearly states that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." (That treaty, BTW, was written under Washington, and unanimously approved by the Senate under John Adams).
Even if the DoI were law, it would have been superceded by both of those documents on this count.
It should also be noted that Jefferson, when crafting the DoI, specifically chose religiously generic language in hopes of avoiding precisely the arguement you are trying to make.
From what is the legal definition of marriage derived?
What the current definition of marriage is or where it came from is irrelevant. As long as marriage is a legal institution it must be non-descriminatory with regards to race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, etc.
Perhaps this should be rephrased as "gay civil unions". Then the hot button 'marriage' wouldn't be in there.
Civil union and marriage are not legally equivalent. If they were we might not be having this discussion at all, since gays already have civil union rights in many states, and those civil unions would have to be recognized by by the rest. Civil union is, at most, a foot in the door, so calling it a simple rephrasing is dishonest.
If you can come up with a supportable, non-religion-based (in other words: not unconstitutional) arguement for why gays should be denied the right to be married, I'm perfectly willing to consider it.
Here's the thing: marriage in America is not a religious institution, it is a legal institution. As such, because of the doctrine of seperation of church and state, to deny gay couples the right to be married because "the Bible says so" is more than illegal; it is unconstitutional.
If you can come up with a different arguement, fine, but this one has been legally invalid for over 200 years.
There's a reason this gets posted every time hydrogen gets mentioned: people still believe that it was the hydrogen that caused the fire, and that simply isn't true.
If the Hindenburg had used helium instead the fire might not have been so catastrophic. I'll give you that. But, if they had used a different paint to paint the skin, they wouldn't have ended up with a composition which is essentially solid rocket fuel, and the fire might not have happened at all.
That was my point.
The hydrogen wasn't the problem, it was the fact that the skin was made of solid rocket fuel. It was actually the skin that was burning, since hydrogen burns so hot you can't see the flames.
From a company that did nothing with Linux until it acquired a GPL distribution?
You have it backwards: They didn't acquire a GPL distribution, the GPL distribution acquired them.
Gee, that ancestral Unix source sure is valuable...