In case you haven't noticed, CA has had a problem for years because the price set by the gov't was so low that nobody wanted to produce electricity at that price.
That's quite possibly true, you know. Possibly, anyway. Except that California's power industry has been deregulated since 1998. Please note that we never had trouble getting electricity before then. All of a sudden, though, once we deregulated, this little company called Enron realized that it could "game the system" and start playing games like taking plants offline to raise prices, selling power to themselves to raise prices, withholding power to raise prices, and just plain raising prices because they felt like it. That's what the rolling blackouts were - plants being taken offline for no valid reason other than to engineer a crisis so that Enron and other power companies could sell the state power at prices well in excess of exorbitant.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and California's some $9 billion in the hole. Oddly enough, that $9 billion is just about the amount the state calculates it overpaid the energy barons during that horrible summer. Matter of fact, there's a lawsuit moving through the courts right now to force Enron, Duke, Dynegy, and the other power utils to pay that money back, seeing as it was fraudulently obtained and all that.
My power and water bills have only been going up.
How much you wanna bet they're not NEARLY as high as my power bill was that summer? Deregulation doesn't provide any meaningful consumer protection, as California proved in 2001.
Near as I can figure (not owning an iPod but wanting to), if your amp has a line-level input, there should be no problem. Test it with the gain dropped way down and see what happens, but the theory should hold.
Re:In Scope References!
on
Professional PHP4
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree.
That's why we did a rough port of DBI to PHP for my workplace PHP environment.
It's amazing what you can do when you actually sit down and write code, instead of bitching about something not being able to do x.
I have been online for 7 years now. I have read/. for over 3 years now, and I am well aware of what goes on in this online world.
Then I can only conclude that you haven't been paying attention. The notion that you are somehow entitled to make money from the internet, just by putting a good or service on the internet, is quite possibly the single most asinine thing I have heard in my life. And quite frankly, this entitlement culture that the commercialization of the internet has spawned makes me sick.
Then you should only browse sites that offer this content for free
Again, asinine. Perhaps you should follow through on your "threat" - move to a subscription-only content model. Do not seek to blame anyone but yourself for your business decisions.
You fail to view the ad, you have stolen from me.
Newp. Uh-uh. No. Not a chance. See... here's the really really good part. Pay attention. It's not just your bandwidth. It's mine, too. See, you pay for what you get from your provider. I pay for what I use from mine. Are you saying that I have no right to decide what enters my computer, over my bandwidth? I hope not.
If you truly feel that you need to make money on the web, then the onus is upon you to move to a content model that supports that theory, rather than blithely assuming that you have some ordained-from-on-high right to spew your drek onto my desktop and thereby profit through your misappropriation of MY bandwidth.
By the way, just so you know, I have installed a technological measure to restrict access to my computer and the content thereupon, including, but not limited to, the contents of my internet cache and cookies. Any circumvention of said measure is a breach of the DMCA and will be treated as such. You have been duly warned.
This is true... and not true at the same time.
I work for a large company (name withheld). We use it here, and quite successfully. I also worked for a large company prior to this one. We used it there, as well.
Lacking x feature or n widget doesn't necessarily stop businesses from using something, it just keeps them from using it for everything.
Linux, my dear fellow, is whatever you want it to be on any given day.
One only wishes that those pontificating against Linux on the desktop would stop getting in the way of those of us who are using it - and using it productively - on the desktop.
> For them to go their own way is not completely unexpected.
You're mostly right. It was *totally* expected. It's pretty much a given that MS only supported Java contingent upon:
their ability to get away with embrace-and-extend
their inability to come up with something different
Once either or both of those conditions were no longer valid, MS had no reason whatsoever to support Java. After all, they "hate" Sun almost as much as Sun "hates" them. The more conspiracy-minded might state that MS supported Java only as a means to an end: draw it out, make it ubiquitous (which they did) and then leave it to die with no support on Microsoft's monopoly platform. Java without MS can almost certainly not survive. And, those same conspiracy-minded people would quite likely be right.
Microsoft doesn't make knee-jerk decisions. EVERYTHING they do is calculated to produce a given set of results, whether that be to curry good will, give plausible deniability in the
event of a lawsuit, extend their already-prodigious monopoly, or squash a competitor like a slow-moving insect..NET is designed to do all of the above. It makes them look good 'cos they're trying to make stuff run for everyone everywhere "regardless of platform". It gives them another "But we're just innovating" card to play in court. It will eat Sun's bottom line for breakfast. And it will lock 95% of the world's computer users into a solution which they cannot get out of without discarding EVERY MS product they own and adopting Linux.
When you look at it this way, it doesn't really matter so much *what*.NET is. What matters more is what.NET will do. Looks like all those checks to politicians were well-spent, Mr. Gates. You just bought yourself a remodeled, tacitly legal monopoly to abuse.
Debian's great... if you feel comfortable enough with Linux to get under the hood a little bit. I think of it as a gateway drug to LFS [linuxfromscratch.org].
But seriously, tools like Red Carpet are great for providing a comfortable environment for the non-geek or linux newbie, giving them a friendly interface to package management. Not everyone out there is ready for Debian - in fact, I'd say that the majority of Linux users aren't ready for Debian or anything beyond it, and even some of those who are ready just want something they can slap onto a machine and go with, a la Red Hat or Mandrake. It's all about comfort zones.
Perhaps, but Israel claims that it has full rights to these territories, since they were not gained as the result of criminal actions or national aggression.
The law is unclear here. I choose to see these territories as nominal parts of Israel, unfortunate swatches of territory mandated by the need for security of a people who have learned the hard way how to deal with their neighbors.
Yet, America's blind and unconditional
support for Israeli atrocities and crimes against the Palestinian people,
Let's just start with this one. I should point out first that the territories Israel currently occupies which stand beyond its internationally recognized borders circa 1950 are, if you will, trophies of war. They are the result of no fewer than three failed genocidal assaults upon the Israeli people and homeland. They were claimed by Israel as a buffer zone against further attacks, following the reasoning that foreign powers would be less-inclined to attack through these regions if their own people lived in them.
I do not in any way condone Israel's actions or methods. But I do recognize the logic behind their possession of these occupation zones, as well as the ultimate responsibility of the Arab nations which attacked Israel for those zones' existence. The people living in those zones have chosen - or perhaps have been spurred - to revolt. Israel is taking the actions it sees fit - within its own territory - to quell those revolts.
Israel's domestic and foreign policies, and its behavior towards the (well-armed, hostile, and actively revolting) citizens of those zones, are its own business - that is their right as a sovereign nation. All have the right to an opinion regarding them. None have the right to attempt to forcibly alter them.
plus the ongoing American assault against the Iraqis
The Iraqis, as a result of their own actions, have been placed under strict conduct limits. American military power protects those limits. The Iraqis choose - voluntarily - to test those limits and are assaulted in return. This is not naked aggression we're talking about , unlike the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This is the enforcement of an internationally agreed-upon cease-fire to which Iraq itself is signatory. It is perhaps easiest to think of Iraq as a criminal here in America who has broken the law and has given up a large measure of his or her rights as a consequence.
was bound to boomerang sooner or later.
Yes, I suppose it was. I am detecting a disturbing trend in the Arab world - and I do not fault any one person or persons, nor any religion for this - to expect things to be given them. They demand the ejection of Israel from the Middle East. They demand the withdrawal of support for Israel by the rest of the world. They demand a Palestinian homeland. They demand, they demand. But they offer no concessions, no cooperation. They refuse to assist in curtailing terror factions. They refuse to acknowledge their own grievous violations of human rights. They refuse to accept that the Jews have as much right to a land of their own as the Muslims do (and if strict historical precedence is any indication, *more* so). Most importantly, they refuse to accept that America, as much as any nation on earth - has the right to choose its own allies.
Attacks such as the one we suffered on Tuesday are nothing more than a schoolyard bully's attempt to affect another individual's behavior. "Stop being friends with so-and-so or I'll pound you one! Okay, I warned you!".
Reflect, if you will, on the truth of the fact that a nation may choose its own course and its own destiny, its own allies and its own policies, and then try to tell me that we "had this coming."
Just don't be surprised if I laugh in your face before ignoring you completely.
Okay, you can accuse me of bias all you like, but I rather like my NEC laptop. I've got a Versa SXi, and had a Versa FX (no longer produced) before that. Both work *extremely* well (at least, they do with Red Hat 7.2).
If I want to view Slashdot with extra links from a program I CHOOSE TO USE, that's my right.
Yeah, it's your right. However, there's a certain question as to whether it's Ezula's right to place those links there. Bear in mind, they are profiting (key point 1) from altering content (key point 2) without the copyright owner's permission (key point 3).
What are they afraid of?
Well, here's an example.
I run a corporate website for a fairly large company.
It includes a jobs page which lists the benefits our employees receive.
One of those listed benefits includes the words "life insurance".
Ezula linked those words to some online insurance sales company, which I nor anyone else I asked had ever heard of.
The overall effect of this is to make it appear as if my company's life insurance carrier is this company. It is not.
This is a bad thing - it alters our content on multiple levels - not only linking people out of our site, but creating the appearance of endorsement.
I don't know if this has happened, but what if someone is considering working for my company, sees this link, notes that this is a life insurance company he or she is not sure of the reliability of, and decides not to take a job here?
That is what I'm afraid of.
> I'll type this very slowly and clearly to ease the task of wrapping your head around a seemingly simple concept:
Yes, your concept seems simple. Actually, though, it's simplistic.
> Microsoft IS the desktop
> If Microsoft is legally unable to release XP, the desktop market will be seriously affected negatively.
This argument is circular. You state that Microsoft IS the desktop [emphasis yours], and that the desktop market will be seriously hurt if Microsoft cannot release XP.
Well, gee. Imagine that. Microsoft being hurt if it can't release a product. Why didn't I think of that?
Perhaps you meant to say the technology market as a whole would be hurt? Or perhaps those ISVs who produce desktop application software? If so, then please cite examples. There is a notable lack of those in your post.
Personally, I don't care if you work for Microsoft. Your reasoning is either circular (assuming you did not mistype your post) or notoriously unsupported (assuming you did).
Just as a side note, y'know, one of those "food for thought" kind of things, perhaps people should consider that Microsoft wouldn't be in this stew if they hadn't violated the law. To allow them to continue their predacious behavior even after being found guilty for said behavior would be the absolute low point (my opinion) of the rather sad history of American democracy.
Unless I'm mistaken, the whole reason this is happening is that people are, in fact, "kicking microsoft's ass with software."
Microsoft made the conscious, corporate-level choice to attack Linux and its philosophical and community underpinnings on a legal front. It falls to the Linux / Free Software community to respond in kind. Simply ignoring them and taking the high road here will not work, since Microsoft is adept at changing the rules of whatever game it plays to its own liking. Should Free Software advocates simply play wait-and-see, they will undoubtedly find the political and marketplace climates turning very chilly, very quickly.
Free software is winning on its own merits; it's Microsoft that recognized its own basic inability to compete fairly and has resorted to bringing out the All-Terrain Assault Lawyers.
Nor for the knee-jerk Windows Defense Corps to do precisely the same thing.
Bear in mind that there will be a similar response, be it posted on Slashdot or no, to virtually anything that any company does. Microsoft just happens to have placed itself in something of an adversarial position to something that a few folks around here are rather partial to. You expect them *not* to have something to say, given the circumstances?
That's the whole reason these things come up on Slashdot in the first place - for community discussion. Zealotry happens, and it most certainly goes both ways.
Where you went wrong, just FYI, is in assuming that opinions posted on Slashdot are anything other than just that: opinions. Or is it just that the public perception of Microsoft and its actions means that much to you?
> speculation: What if apple made x86 hardware, and ported OS X ?
Good idea, and one that I've heard before, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, the old adage that just because you can do a thing doesn't necessarily mean that you should do that thing.
Follow my logic here, if you will.
Apple has long-standing hardware relationships with IBM/Motorola. Transitioning to x86 or even IA-64 would mean abandoning those relationships. Apple also has a very good processor in the PPC, and a large amount of time, money and code invested in AltiVec (the vector-processing capabilities of the G4 processor). I don't see Apple willing or even able to discard those relationships with any degree of ease.
"But what about selling both?" you may ask. And it's a good question. The answer is that Steve Jobs would have kittens - he worked very hard when he first became iCEO to get rid of excessive fragmentation of Apple's hardware products. Apple has revived itself on the strength of its four main offerings ("Consumer" and "Pro" desktops and portables - iBook, PowerBook G4, iMac, and Power Macintosh G4, for the uninitiated).
To all of a sudden add completely different hardware into that mix - hardware that is fundamentally incompatible with everything Apple has ever produced - would break that successful, efficient model on a number of very basic levels.
Lastly, there's the Microsoft factor. Microsoft has virtually complete ownership of the OS market (Linux, *BSD, and micro-niche players excluded, natch) on X86. They are quite obviously aiming to continue that tradition on IA-64. The notion of Apple invading that space would lead to a number of typically Microsoftian reactions that would more than likely do severe damage to Apple's bottom line. It's an easy progression to imagine: first stage, Microsoft kills development of IE for Mac. Second stage, they kill development of Office:mac. Third stage, they "compete aggressively" (also pronounced "lie, cheat, and steal") to reduce QuickTime to irrelevance. Lastly, they use the momentum generated from those three maneuvers to point out that the Mac OS in any form (FUD, FUD, FUD) is now useless, as it now lacks an office suite, no longer possesses a leading web browser, and comes bundled with an irrelevant media creation/playback suite. Furthermore, (FUD, FUD, FUD) it uses (*gasp*) Open Source Software!
Any one of these things would be mitigatable. All of them would represent the complete and utter destruction of Apple. Maybe some folks around here consider that to be no great loss. But it will be - where would desktop computing be without Apple around to stea^H^H^H^H get ideas from? Face it, I think most folks actually enjoy seeing what sort of crazy, cool new or old-but-facelifted technologies come out of Cupertino.
I myself would genuinely love to see OS X on x86 hardware. I'd *love* to be able to use it instead of Windoze on the cheap-yet-powerful commodity hardware that is coming around on the x86 side of the market. But I know in my heart of hearts that Apple will never, ever, ever do anything that would give Microsoft an opportunity to force them out of business.
I hate to be tiresome, but if you don't want the responsibilities that come with using GPL code, then don't use it. Period.
You're not obligated to use GPL code. If you wish to make use of the work of someone else who has already solved your problem, you must be prepared to contribute back to the community. Your alternative is to reinvent the wheel, to solve your problem in-house, with proprietary code. It is up to the developer/corporation/whatever to decide which route is more burdensome for its bottom line and for its users.
The GPL is not a lasso or a cattle prod - you are not required to use software protected by it. So, in other words, it hurts precisely nobody.
While I realize you meant to be funny, you've actually hit upon a very good point. One of the coldest things you can do to a struggling company is to point out exactly how bad off they are - these things aren't always common knowledge.
If UGO is in such bad shape that they need to push such draconian schemes on their member sites, publicity is the absolute drop-dead last thing they're likely to want, for at least a couple of reasons that I can think of. Creditors can read Slashdot, too - and if these creditors read here how truly horrid UGO's situation is, they're likely to step up their pressure to get their money before UGO goes out of business. Lawyers, too, can read Slashdot - I know of a few who do on a regular basis - and might be very interested in pursuing this case. UGO really doesn't want that. What they probably do want is to save as much cash as they possibly can by bilking their member sites out of promised payments, and to do so as quietly as possible, so as not to attract the attention of certain metaphorical sharks in the metaphorical water.
Of course, any notion of UGO using such monies for "golden parachutes" for their employees once the end comes is pure and utter speculation, completely unfounded.
It seems to me that the best thing the submitter could have possibly done is to air this particular item of dirty laundry in public.
I expect you're right that Stalin's hatred for religion stemmed from his brutal religious upbringing.
I should point out that it is generally *assumed* to be this way. We know that the Georgian R.S.F.S.R. was a rather heavily religious region (though diverse - Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and some few Eastern Jews shared the region), and we know that Stalin's family was, by all accounts, fairly religiously observant. We draw the conclusion, therefore, that Stalin was reacting violently to an unhappy childhood. But I don't think we'll ever truly know for certain - like all "cult of personality" leaders, he engineered his own past, changed the facts to fit what he wished them to be.
This may be due to his rivalry with Trotsky (Lev Bronstein to you), who was of Jewish extraction although I don't know if he had any religious beliefs
Actually, it's generally presumed that Stalin's hatred for the Jews and other religions was fairly firmly in place by the time of Lenin's death in 1924 (it might have been 1927?). Stalin and Trotsky were the two most prominent contenders for Lenin's position. Trotsky, you're correct in stating, had a certain hatred for Stalin, though this was not totally socio-ethnic. It was also firmly rooted in Trotsky's personal standing as a realist - he knew that Stalin, with his hyper-extremist views, would be the worst possible leader for the fledgling Soviet Union. Trotsky knew that to promote Marx's view of "World Communism", Communists had to present an organized, successful, and even openly friendly front, and Stalin's psychoses made this an impossibility. Trotsky placed himself in the contention for the mantle of leadership of the Soviet Union more to make sure that Stalin didn't acquire it, I think, more than out of any real desire to possess it for himself.
Stalin killed EVERYONE and ANYONE regardless of their religious or even political beliefs.
Actually, that's not quite true - as I stated in another post, Stalin was psychotic, true, but he wasn't lacking his faculties. He had a particular mad on for religion (in part, I believe, due to an unhappy childhood in a fairly religiously observant family in a fairly religiously observant republic - the Georgian R.S.F.S.R.). Being a strict Marxist, he viewed religion and its practicioners as the paramount threat to any socialist or Communist state. Therefore, they had to go.
While not every single one of Stalin's victims (and again, here, history denies us a true accounting since we will never truly know just whose deaths were at Stalin's express or implied command) was religious, a disproportionately large number were - particularly in a country that had, at that point in time, no official religion and virtually no tolerance for even its former dominant religion, the Russian Orthodox Church.
You're right, though, when you say that Stalin killed anyone who might have threatened his power. What you're leaving out is his personal motivation - his distaste for religion was fostered in his childhood, amplified by the teachings of Marx, and elevated to infamously genocidal levels by his paranoid psychosis and absolute power in Russia.
It's correct to state that not *every* one of his victims was a Jew, nor even religious. But it's incorrect to say that his depredations were in any way ecumenical.
It helps to have an understanding of Stalin's motivations. Stalin, it is commonly believed (and I concur), believed that Russia had no need of any God while it had him. This was part of the reason for his name-change (undertaken in the early 20's, IIRC from Dzhugashvili to Stalin, which literally mans "Man of Steel"). He was the classic cult of personality with a psychotic bent, unwilling to or incapable of acknowledging that there was *any* higher power than he.
Which explains quite well why Joey wanted to get rid of the Jews, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the nascent Muslim population of the trans-Caucasian republics. Religion in particular represented a threat to his rule, as did intellectuals of all stripes, because it implied that there existed a power higher than Stalin (and by extension, the State) himself. Bear in mind, also, that Stalin was a rather unbending Marxist -- and believed strongly that religion could be the downfall of any Socialist or Communist state because it took people's minds and thoughts away from where they belonged (the State) and placed them in the realm of "fantasy" (i.e. God).
Stalin's aggression wasn't just aimed at religous folk, but they were certainly one of his primary targets. And the fact that *all* his victims weren't religious doesn't in any way alter the fact that he was an atheist, committing crimes writ large against, in large part, theists.
I hope this makes my point somewhat more clearly, though I should point out that I feel little to no need to "convince" you - I merely provide information. You may take it or leave it at your leisure, and to nobody's detriment but your own.
Actually, most Japanese, IIRC, are Shintoists, which is another non-deistic religion.
The numbers may never be known, but they killed some thirty million Chinese in Manchuria from 1932 to 1939. Note that this is in no way a reflection upon modern Japanese, nor upon the corporation for which I work.
It's almost interesting, though, that you *could* call the Japanese deists, because of their belief (in that time, I don't know if it prevails today) that their Emperor was a god. Regardless, Shinto is a non-deistic religion having much to do with the spirits of one's ancestors. This, however, did not insulate the Japanese from succumbing to the general madness in the world around the middle of the last century.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where to begin.
You probably shouldn't have.
In case you haven't noticed, CA has had a problem for years because the price set by the gov't was so low that nobody wanted to produce electricity at that price.
That's quite possibly true, you know. Possibly, anyway. Except that California's power industry has been deregulated since 1998. Please note that we never had trouble getting electricity before then. All of a sudden, though, once we deregulated, this little company called Enron realized that it could "game the system" and start playing games like taking plants offline to raise prices, selling power to themselves to raise prices, withholding power to raise prices, and just plain raising prices because they felt like it. That's what the rolling blackouts were - plants being taken offline for no valid reason other than to engineer a crisis so that Enron and other power companies could sell the state power at prices well in excess of exorbitant.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and California's some $9 billion in the hole. Oddly enough, that $9 billion is just about the amount the state calculates it overpaid the energy barons during that horrible summer. Matter of fact, there's a lawsuit moving through the courts right now to force Enron, Duke, Dynegy, and the other power utils to pay that money back, seeing as it was fraudulently obtained and all that.
My power and water bills have only been going up.
How much you wanna bet they're not NEARLY as high as my power bill was that summer? Deregulation doesn't provide any meaningful consumer protection, as California proved in 2001.
Near as I can figure (not owning an iPod but wanting to), if your amp has a line-level input, there should be no problem. Test it with the gain dropped way down and see what happens, but the theory should hold.
I agree. That's why we did a rough port of DBI to PHP for my workplace PHP environment. It's amazing what you can do when you actually sit down and write code, instead of bitching about something not being able to do x.
Then I can only conclude that you haven't been paying attention. The notion that you are somehow entitled to make money from the internet, just by putting a good or service on the internet, is quite possibly the single most asinine thing I have heard in my life. And quite frankly, this entitlement culture that the commercialization of the internet has spawned makes me sick.
Then you should only browse sites that offer this content for free
Again, asinine. Perhaps you should follow through on your "threat" - move to a subscription-only content model. Do not seek to blame anyone but yourself for your business decisions.
You fail to view the ad, you have stolen from me.
Newp. Uh-uh. No. Not a chance. See... here's the really really good part. Pay attention. It's not just your bandwidth. It's mine, too. See, you pay for what you get from your provider. I pay for what I use from mine. Are you saying that I have no right to decide what enters my computer, over my bandwidth? I hope not.
If you truly feel that you need to make money on the web, then the onus is upon you to move to a content model that supports that theory, rather than blithely assuming that you have some ordained-from-on-high right to spew your drek onto my desktop and thereby profit through your misappropriation of MY bandwidth.
By the way, just so you know, I have installed a technological measure to restrict access to my computer and the content thereupon, including, but not limited to, the contents of my internet cache and cookies. Any circumvention of said measure is a breach of the DMCA and will be treated as such. You have been duly warned.
Lacking x feature or n widget doesn't necessarily stop businesses from using something, it just keeps them from using it for everything.
Linux, my dear fellow, is whatever you want it to be on any given day.
One only wishes that those pontificating against Linux on the desktop would stop getting in the way of those of us who are using it - and using it productively - on the desktop.
You print your pr0n?
Whatta concept...
I wonder if I'm the only person who finds it moderately amusing that the revision is older than the original.
You're mostly right. It was *totally* expected. It's pretty much a given that MS only supported Java contingent upon:
their ability to get away with embrace-and-extend
their inability to come up with something different
Once either or both of those conditions were no longer valid, MS had no reason whatsoever to support Java. After all, they "hate" Sun almost as much as Sun "hates" them. The more conspiracy-minded might state that MS supported Java only as a means to an end: draw it out, make it ubiquitous (which they did) and then leave it to die with no support on Microsoft's monopoly platform. Java without MS can almost certainly not survive. And, those same conspiracy-minded people would quite likely be right.
Microsoft doesn't make knee-jerk decisions. EVERYTHING they do is calculated to produce a given set of results, whether that be to curry good will, give plausible deniability in the event of a lawsuit, extend their already-prodigious monopoly, or squash a competitor like a slow-moving insect. .NET is designed to do all of the above. It makes them look good 'cos they're trying to make stuff run for everyone everywhere "regardless of platform". It gives them another "But we're just innovating" card to play in court. It will eat Sun's bottom line for breakfast. And it will lock 95% of the world's computer users into a solution which they cannot get out of without discarding EVERY MS product they own and adopting Linux.
When you look at it this way, it doesn't really matter so much *what* .NET is. What matters more is what .NET will do. Looks like all those checks to politicians were well-spent, Mr. Gates. You just bought yourself a remodeled, tacitly legal monopoly to abuse.
But seriously, tools like Red Carpet are great for providing a comfortable environment for the non-geek or linux newbie, giving them a friendly interface to package management. Not everyone out there is ready for Debian - in fact, I'd say that the majority of Linux users aren't ready for Debian or anything beyond it, and even some of those who are ready just want something they can slap onto a machine and go with, a la Red Hat or Mandrake. It's all about comfort zones.
I don't think you can arm an energy beam with a large stick on the front.
The law is unclear here. I choose to see these territories as nominal parts of Israel, unfortunate swatches of territory mandated by the need for security of a people who have learned the hard way how to deal with their neighbors.
Yet, America's blind and unconditional support for Israeli atrocities and crimes against the Palestinian people,
Let's just start with this one. I should point out first that the territories Israel currently occupies which stand beyond its internationally recognized borders circa 1950 are, if you will, trophies of war. They are the result of no fewer than three failed genocidal assaults upon the Israeli people and homeland. They were claimed by Israel as a buffer zone against further attacks, following the reasoning that foreign powers would be less-inclined to attack through these regions if their own people lived in them.
I do not in any way condone Israel's actions or methods. But I do recognize the logic behind their possession of these occupation zones, as well as the ultimate responsibility of the Arab nations which attacked Israel for those zones' existence. The people living in those zones have chosen - or perhaps have been spurred - to revolt. Israel is taking the actions it sees fit - within its own territory - to quell those revolts.
Israel's domestic and foreign policies, and its behavior towards the (well-armed, hostile, and actively revolting) citizens of those zones, are its own business - that is their right as a sovereign nation. All have the right to an opinion regarding them. None have the right to attempt to forcibly alter them.
plus the ongoing American assault against the Iraqis
The Iraqis, as a result of their own actions, have been placed under strict conduct limits. American military power protects those limits. The Iraqis choose - voluntarily - to test those limits and are assaulted in return. This is not naked aggression we're talking about , unlike the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This is the enforcement of an internationally agreed-upon cease-fire to which Iraq itself is signatory. It is perhaps easiest to think of Iraq as a criminal here in America who has broken the law and has given up a large measure of his or her rights as a consequence.
was bound to boomerang sooner or later.
Yes, I suppose it was. I am detecting a disturbing trend in the Arab world - and I do not fault any one person or persons, nor any religion for this - to expect things to be given them. They demand the ejection of Israel from the Middle East. They demand the withdrawal of support for Israel by the rest of the world. They demand a Palestinian homeland. They demand, they demand. But they offer no concessions, no cooperation. They refuse to assist in curtailing terror factions. They refuse to acknowledge their own grievous violations of human rights. They refuse to accept that the Jews have as much right to a land of their own as the Muslims do (and if strict historical precedence is any indication, *more* so). Most importantly, they refuse to accept that America, as much as any nation on earth - has the right to choose its own allies. Attacks such as the one we suffered on Tuesday are nothing more than a schoolyard bully's attempt to affect another individual's behavior. "Stop being friends with so-and-so or I'll pound you one! Okay, I warned you!".
Reflect, if you will, on the truth of the fact that a nation may choose its own course and its own destiny, its own allies and its own policies, and then try to tell me that we "had this coming."
Just don't be surprised if I laugh in your face before ignoring you completely.
Okay, you can accuse me of bias all you like, but I rather like my NEC laptop. I've got a Versa SXi, and had a Versa FX (no longer produced) before that. Both work *extremely* well (at least, they do with Red Hat 7.2).
Yeah, it's your right. However, there's a certain question as to whether it's Ezula's right to place those links there. Bear in mind, they are profiting (key point 1) from altering content (key point 2) without the copyright owner's permission (key point 3).
What are they afraid of?
Well, here's an example. I run a corporate website for a fairly large company. It includes a jobs page which lists the benefits our employees receive. One of those listed benefits includes the words "life insurance". Ezula linked those words to some online insurance sales company, which I nor anyone else I asked had ever heard of. The overall effect of this is to make it appear as if my company's life insurance carrier is this company. It is not. This is a bad thing - it alters our content on multiple levels - not only linking people out of our site, but creating the appearance of endorsement. I don't know if this has happened, but what if someone is considering working for my company, sees this link, notes that this is a life insurance company he or she is not sure of the reliability of, and decides not to take a job here? That is what I'm afraid of.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Yes, your concept seems simple. Actually, though, it's simplistic.
> Microsoft IS the desktop
> If Microsoft is legally unable to release XP, the desktop market will be seriously affected negatively.
This argument is circular. You state that Microsoft IS the desktop [emphasis yours], and that the desktop market will be seriously hurt if Microsoft cannot release XP. Well, gee. Imagine that. Microsoft being hurt if it can't release a product. Why didn't I think of that?
Perhaps you meant to say the technology market as a whole would be hurt? Or perhaps those ISVs who produce desktop application software? If so, then please cite examples. There is a notable lack of those in your post.
Personally, I don't care if you work for Microsoft. Your reasoning is either circular (assuming you did not mistype your post) or notoriously unsupported (assuming you did).
Just as a side note, y'know, one of those "food for thought" kind of things, perhaps people should consider that Microsoft wouldn't be in this stew if they hadn't violated the law. To allow them to continue their predacious behavior even after being found guilty for said behavior would be the absolute low point (my opinion) of the rather sad history of American democracy.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Microsoft made the conscious, corporate-level choice to attack Linux and its philosophical and community underpinnings on a legal front. It falls to the Linux / Free Software community to respond in kind. Simply ignoring them and taking the high road here will not work, since Microsoft is adept at changing the rules of whatever game it plays to its own liking. Should Free Software advocates simply play wait-and-see, they will undoubtedly find the political and marketplace climates turning very chilly, very quickly.
Free software is winning on its own merits; it's Microsoft that recognized its own basic inability to compete fairly and has resorted to bringing out the All-Terrain Assault Lawyers.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Bear in mind that there will be a similar response, be it posted on Slashdot or no, to virtually anything that any company does. Microsoft just happens to have placed itself in something of an adversarial position to something that a few folks around here are rather partial to. You expect them *not* to have something to say, given the circumstances?
That's the whole reason these things come up on Slashdot in the first place - for community discussion. Zealotry happens, and it most certainly goes both ways.
Where you went wrong, just FYI, is in assuming that opinions posted on Slashdot are anything other than just that: opinions. Or is it just that the public perception of Microsoft and its actions means that much to you?
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Good idea, and one that I've heard before, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, the old adage that just because you can do a thing doesn't necessarily mean that you should do that thing.
Follow my logic here, if you will.
Apple has long-standing hardware relationships with IBM/Motorola. Transitioning to x86 or even IA-64 would mean abandoning those relationships. Apple also has a very good processor in the PPC, and a large amount of time, money and code invested in AltiVec (the vector-processing capabilities of the G4 processor). I don't see Apple willing or even able to discard those relationships with any degree of ease.
"But what about selling both?" you may ask. And it's a good question. The answer is that Steve Jobs would have kittens - he worked very hard when he first became iCEO to get rid of excessive fragmentation of Apple's hardware products. Apple has revived itself on the strength of its four main offerings ("Consumer" and "Pro" desktops and portables - iBook, PowerBook G4, iMac, and Power Macintosh G4, for the uninitiated). To all of a sudden add completely different hardware into that mix - hardware that is fundamentally incompatible with everything Apple has ever produced - would break that successful, efficient model on a number of very basic levels.
Lastly, there's the Microsoft factor. Microsoft has virtually complete ownership of the OS market (Linux, *BSD, and micro-niche players excluded, natch) on X86. They are quite obviously aiming to continue that tradition on IA-64. The notion of Apple invading that space would lead to a number of typically Microsoftian reactions that would more than likely do severe damage to Apple's bottom line. It's an easy progression to imagine: first stage, Microsoft kills development of IE for Mac. Second stage, they kill development of Office:mac. Third stage, they "compete aggressively" (also pronounced "lie, cheat, and steal") to reduce QuickTime to irrelevance. Lastly, they use the momentum generated from those three maneuvers to point out that the Mac OS in any form (FUD, FUD, FUD) is now useless, as it now lacks an office suite, no longer possesses a leading web browser, and comes bundled with an irrelevant media creation/playback suite. Furthermore, (FUD, FUD, FUD) it uses (*gasp*) Open Source Software!
Any one of these things would be mitigatable. All of them would represent the complete and utter destruction of Apple. Maybe some folks around here consider that to be no great loss. But it will be - where would desktop computing be without Apple around to stea^H^H^H^H get ideas from? Face it, I think most folks actually enjoy seeing what sort of crazy, cool new or old-but-facelifted technologies come out of Cupertino.
I myself would genuinely love to see OS X on x86 hardware. I'd *love* to be able to use it instead of Windoze on the cheap-yet-powerful commodity hardware that is coming around on the x86 side of the market. But I know in my heart of hearts that Apple will never, ever, ever do anything that would give Microsoft an opportunity to force them out of business.
Sad, isn't it?
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
You're not obligated to use GPL code. If you wish to make use of the work of someone else who has already solved your problem, you must be prepared to contribute back to the community. Your alternative is to reinvent the wheel, to solve your problem in-house, with proprietary code. It is up to the developer/corporation/whatever to decide which route is more burdensome for its bottom line and for its users.
The GPL is not a lasso or a cattle prod - you are not required to use software protected by it. So, in other words, it hurts precisely nobody.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
If UGO is in such bad shape that they need to push such draconian schemes on their member sites, publicity is the absolute drop-dead last thing they're likely to want, for at least a couple of reasons that I can think of. Creditors can read Slashdot, too - and if these creditors read here how truly horrid UGO's situation is, they're likely to step up their pressure to get their money before UGO goes out of business. Lawyers, too, can read Slashdot - I know of a few who do on a regular basis - and might be very interested in pursuing this case. UGO really doesn't want that. What they probably do want is to save as much cash as they possibly can by bilking their member sites out of promised payments, and to do so as quietly as possible, so as not to attract the attention of certain metaphorical sharks in the metaphorical water.
Of course, any notion of UGO using such monies for "golden parachutes" for their employees once the end comes is pure and utter speculation, completely unfounded.
It seems to me that the best thing the submitter could have possibly done is to air this particular item of dirty laundry in public.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
I should point out that it is generally *assumed* to be this way. We know that the Georgian R.S.F.S.R. was a rather heavily religious region (though diverse - Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and some few Eastern Jews shared the region), and we know that Stalin's family was, by all accounts, fairly religiously observant. We draw the conclusion, therefore, that Stalin was reacting violently to an unhappy childhood. But I don't think we'll ever truly know for certain - like all "cult of personality" leaders, he engineered his own past, changed the facts to fit what he wished them to be.
This may be due to his rivalry with Trotsky (Lev Bronstein to you), who was of Jewish extraction although I don't know if he had any religious beliefs
Actually, it's generally presumed that Stalin's hatred for the Jews and other religions was fairly firmly in place by the time of Lenin's death in 1924 (it might have been 1927?). Stalin and Trotsky were the two most prominent contenders for Lenin's position. Trotsky, you're correct in stating, had a certain hatred for Stalin, though this was not totally socio-ethnic. It was also firmly rooted in Trotsky's personal standing as a realist - he knew that Stalin, with his hyper-extremist views, would be the worst possible leader for the fledgling Soviet Union. Trotsky knew that to promote Marx's view of "World Communism", Communists had to present an organized, successful, and even openly friendly front, and Stalin's psychoses made this an impossibility. Trotsky placed himself in the contention for the mantle of leadership of the Soviet Union more to make sure that Stalin didn't acquire it, I think, more than out of any real desire to possess it for himself.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Actually, that's not quite true - as I stated in another post, Stalin was psychotic, true, but he wasn't lacking his faculties. He had a particular mad on for religion (in part, I believe, due to an unhappy childhood in a fairly religiously observant family in a fairly religiously observant republic - the Georgian R.S.F.S.R.). Being a strict Marxist, he viewed religion and its practicioners as the paramount threat to any socialist or Communist state. Therefore, they had to go.
While not every single one of Stalin's victims (and again, here, history denies us a true accounting since we will never truly know just whose deaths were at Stalin's express or implied command) was religious, a disproportionately large number were - particularly in a country that had, at that point in time, no official religion and virtually no tolerance for even its former dominant religion, the Russian Orthodox Church.
You're right, though, when you say that Stalin killed anyone who might have threatened his power. What you're leaving out is his personal motivation - his distaste for religion was fostered in his childhood, amplified by the teachings of Marx, and elevated to infamously genocidal levels by his paranoid psychosis and absolute power in Russia.
It's correct to state that not *every* one of his victims was a Jew, nor even religious. But it's incorrect to say that his depredations were in any way ecumenical.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Which explains quite well why Joey wanted to get rid of the Jews, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the nascent Muslim population of the trans-Caucasian republics. Religion in particular represented a threat to his rule, as did intellectuals of all stripes, because it implied that there existed a power higher than Stalin (and by extension, the State) himself. Bear in mind, also, that Stalin was a rather unbending Marxist -- and believed strongly that religion could be the downfall of any Socialist or Communist state because it took people's minds and thoughts away from where they belonged (the State) and placed them in the realm of "fantasy" (i.e. God).
Stalin's aggression wasn't just aimed at religous folk, but they were certainly one of his primary targets. And the fact that *all* his victims weren't religious doesn't in any way alter the fact that he was an atheist, committing crimes writ large against, in large part, theists.
I hope this makes my point somewhat more clearly, though I should point out that I feel little to no need to "convince" you - I merely provide information. You may take it or leave it at your leisure, and to nobody's detriment but your own.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
The numbers may never be known, but they killed some thirty million Chinese in Manchuria from 1932 to 1939. Note that this is in no way a reflection upon modern Japanese, nor upon the corporation for which I work.
It's almost interesting, though, that you *could* call the Japanese deists, because of their belief (in that time, I don't know if it prevails today) that their Emperor was a god. Regardless, Shinto is a non-deistic religion having much to do with the spirits of one's ancestors. This, however, did not insulate the Japanese from succumbing to the general madness in the world around the middle of the last century.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.