I suspect (though I can't provide hard numbers to prove it) that the majority of the legitimate traffic on bittorrent is concerts and recordings by artists that allow taping and trading. Not just the domain of classic "hippie" bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish any more, this now includes bands as diverse as the Butthole Surfers, Charlie Hunter, They Might Be Giants and the Funky Meters (the "other" Neville Brother's band).
I don't know about the percentages, but most (or at least many) BT users know that it's much easier to track down the users (because of centralized trackers), which tends to mildly discourage the illegitimate users, leading to a probably higher percentage of legitimate users even during regular times.
And Linux CDs aren't the only legitimate use of BT. Fans of "Bands That Allow Taping" (BTAT) prefer lossless formats (shn, flac) for distributing their legitimate concert recordings, and tend to use bittorrent. Since the individual songs are five times larger (due to lossless compression), and since these concerts tend to be distributed as a whole, rather than song-at-a-time, that's a fair amount of traffic involved. And since the audience for BTAT tend to be somewhat older on average (discounting a few anomolies like Jason Mraz), there's not going to be as much seasonal variation.
When Linux Journal did an article about bittorrent last year, their example image showed a legitimate download of a Widespread Panic concert, not a Linux distro. The Etree BT tracker includes a lot of stuff from the usual suspects (Grateful Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews), but also a fair amount of interest to different audiences (They Might Be Giants, Primus/Les Claypool, Ween, Tenacious D, Butthole Surfers, Charlie Hunter, etc.).
Twenty million Deadheads may be a drop in the bucket compared to the Kazaa "community", but when you consider that those Deadheads are sharing sets of files that are one to five hundred times as large as the individual files that are shared on Kazaa, and factor in the fans of nearly 1000 other bands that also allow taping/trading, and you might be starting to talk an almost measurable percentage of BT traffic. It might be more than you think. Maybe. Possibly.:)
You are mistaken on this point. The FSF does not interpret the GPL to mean anything about linkage. The FSF interprets copyright law as saying that linkage constitutes copyright derivation. You may disagree, but that doesn't change the fact that the GPL is solely a defense against charges of copyright violation!
If you violate the GPL, then the GPL no longer applies to you. But accepting the GPL is voluntary. If what you do with the GPL'd code is not violating copyright law, then the GPL is irrelevant, and you can argue that you never accepted it. If what you do with the GPL'd code does violate copyright law, then your only possible defense is that the GPL granted you the right to do what you did (which is only true if you adhered to its terms). But the GPL can never take away rights, by definition, because it exists solely as a defense against charges of copyright violation. If there is no possibility of copyright infringement, the GPL is moot.
I don't know if I agree about the evil part - I'm not sure that cartels are any more implicitly evil than monopolies. Especially cartels which aren't monopolies, and even more especially cartels founded in response to monopolies or the threat of monopoly.
But your etymology seems sound. Thanks for the tip and the link.
Somewhere around 90% of MS's operating system sales are to other companies, called OEMs, or Original Equipment Manufacturers. Companies like HP and IBM and Dell and Gateway and a horde of smaller vendors. It's MS's actual customers, the OEMs, who were complaining about their strong-arm tactics and abusive pricing schemes and whatnot. (Although many of the OEMs complained quietly, for fear of offending the great and mighty MS who could crush them like a bug and triple the overall costs of their systems on a whim.) The whole reason the USDOJ got involved with the question of browsers is that OEMs wanted to offer their customers a choice between Netscape and IE (this was, if you'll recall, back when Netscape dominated the market), and MS said, "try it and we'll remove your generative organs with a rusty spoon."
Anyway, the real point is not that MS has a "more real" monopoly or something. The big issue is that MS abuses their monopoly. Gratuitously and incessantly. When you have a monopoly, free market rules no longer apply (by definition), so the market has to trust in your good behavior. Which is why abuse of monopoly is called "anti-trust".
I'm down to about four cheesy SF novels a week now. Back when I was in school (late seventies), it was more like ten. That's a pretty sharp decline, I suppose.:)
My local library doesnt carry any star trek or HGTTG books.
I won't comment on your choice of reading material, since mine is pretty dubious too. But...have you asked them about it? How are they to know that local people are interested in these books if local people don't ask them about these books? Most librarians would rather carry books that get used and read than books that sit around gathering dust, but won't know what you want unless you tell them.
Also, most libraries have agreements to share books with other libraries in the area, and you can usually check for books you're interested in through the library computer system. Maybe your local library doesn't have the books you want, but maybe the one in the next town does, and will happily ship them over for you if you just ask.
The claim also contains the assumption that applications are CPU-bound. All the recompiling in the world won't make something go faster if it's waiting on a disk or a UART or a NIC. Many applications are fast enough anyway -- who cares if/bin/cat gets a 2% improvement of its CPU use? I bet I could add a 20 microsecond gratuitous delay in the main loop of cat, and not noticably affect its performance!
That said, the kinds of things I would like to have extra-optimized for speed are generally big, huge, complicated things that take forever to compile. Like an Xserver. And that's definitely where distcc could come in handy.
It doesn't say "children's songs", it says, "for the whole family". I know - that's usually shorthand for "for kids", but in this case, it seems, they meant it. I think it is at easily their best album since Flood, and it might even be better.
Think of the song Particle Man. You could call that a kid's song - it's bouncy and fun, and kids love it. But it's quirky and odd enough to keep adults entertained too. No! is like that, except more so, and it's got a lot more depth and range.
But don't just take my word for it! If you have flash, you can judge for yourself. They have samples of most of the songs at www.giantkid.net. (The CD version of the album also includes a much more extensive version of the same flash game/thingie.)
It's not just so much that MS is a monopoly, or even the fact that they've violated anti-trust laws to illegally maintain and extend their monopoly (for having a monopoly is not actually wrong in and of itself). It's the fact that there was a consent decree (stemming from their monopoly abuse) specifically forbidding them from bundling more apps with their system. (Unfortunately, it had a loophole for "apps necessary for the operation of the system", which MS abuses on a regular basis, but that's a side issue.)
MS can't ship "stacks and stacks of applications" because they're being punished! They were bad, and they have to go sit in a corner! If they'd stop being bad, then maybe their punishment would stop sometime (but if they weren't being bad, they might not want to bundle apps quite so much).
It's like a guy in jail whining, "other people can go to the movies anytime they want without getting in trouble, but I can't - it's not FAA-I-I-R!" Ya did the crime, now do yer time and shaddup!
One of my associates emailed me to chide me - as the Debian tcl/tk maintainer I should know better - tcl has been byte-compiled since 8.0. I plead old age, early morning posting, and insufficient coffee.:)
Technically, you're wrong; they're byte-compiled (except maybe tcl). But I understand what you mean. But so what? They're pretty damn enlightened! Check out, e.g., Zope before you sneer at python.
All this extra code allows the programs to be clearer, better organized.
By that logic, assembly language programs must be the clearest and best organized programs of all.
> people who usually don't have a clue what else is out there.
Maybe you?
Well, in nearly 25 years as a professional software developer, I have used (off the top of my head) assembler, basic, C, C++, forth, java, lisp, pascal, perl, python, shell and tcl, and dabbled in ADA, APL, eiffel, prolog, ruby, smalltalk, snobol and more. The biggest gap in my education is probably the functional languages like OCaml and Haskell. I think I have at least a bit of an idea what's out there. How 'bout you?
Microsoft has never needed a decent marketing team -- they were handed their monopoly on a silver platter by IBM. Since then, their business strategy has had more to do with intimidating OEMs than appealing to customers. Still, I don't think their office ads are as bad or dumb as their choice of a bug as the spokesmodel for MSN!:)
Portable, standardized language and interfaces are what gives Java it's power.
Yeah, because gods know that no other language has ever been portable or standardized.
Unless protected by a strong consortium [...] Java would rapidly fragment into several code forks
Just as has happened with those other highly portable, standardized, cross-platform languages like Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, etc. (Oh wait, I forgot, there are no other portable, standardized, cross-platform languages, my mistake.) Yeah, clearly, every language that isn't under the rigid control of corporate-owned constortia is instantly subject to massive forking by the dangerous denizens of the dark side. Open-sourcing computer languages makes the baby jebus cry!
Java's embedded documentation [...]
Oh, yeah, too bad the perl coders couldn't come up with something like that years before java even existed! Come to think of it, I think the perl guys borrowed it from lisp! Oh well, it's clearly an advantage of Java and of no other language!
And the best part about using java? It's low-level C/C++-like syntax and data structures means that you get to write many times more lines of code than you would need to to code the equivalent in tcl or perl or python. Why is that good? More money for programmers to write and (especially) to maintain all that extra code!
Java, with the support costs of a low level language, the run-time overheads of a high-level one, and the benefits of neither, is clearly the best choice. Just try it, and you'll be sayin', "Wow! I gotta get me some o' dat!"
Whoops, sorry, was I waxing sarcastic again?:)
Oh yeah, and all three of those other languages I mentioned have all settled on a single cross-platform GUI toolkit to share (Tk). How many GUI toolkits are fighting for dominance in the java world these days? I stopped counting after three. Boy, that there's some good standardization!
Aaaanyway, I don't want to bash java too hard. I actually think it's a pretty decent language overall. I just get so tired of people who think it's God's Gift; people who usually don't have a clue what else is out there. Java's ok, but it ain't All That!
So, basically, they "discovered" this vulnerability after the major browser vendors had already fixed it!?! Wow, that is an amazing "discovery!" How do they do it? Y'know, next, maybe they can discover something really amazing and new, like, say, America! Or F=MA!:)
That means they don't get to drop something just because they don't like it (as ISP's routinely do with SPAM and such).
Geeze, the one spelling (all-caps) that Hormel has reserved for itself, and you insist on using it inappropriately! Get it straight! Unsolicited commercial email and the like may be spam or Spam or even sP4m, but is never SPAM! SPAM is the trademark for a tinned meat product. ISPs don't routinely do anything with SPAM, but they may routinely filter or block spam.
Aside from the fact that you left out a few motivations, I agree. (And you didn't deserve the "troll" mod, IMO.) The motivations of software developers are much like the motivations of everyone else: money, sex, power, prestige, frustration, curiousity, comfort, etc.[*] There's no mystery here--developers are people, and, generally, have the same motivations as other people.
The quote, "[o]ther than Linux, all the other open-source projects move along at a rate best described as glacial," is both false and rather stupid, but that's a separate issue. Open source projects, like all projects, move at a variety of rates, some fast, some slow. I'm a little surprised that Dvorak said that, since he's usually not quite that clueless, but then I'm also not quite sure how his article ties into the question of the motivations of developers.
[*] "Money, sex, power and elephants," is the curious list proposed by Barrayaran ImpSec Chief Simon Illyan.
I seriously question that statement, since GNOME is supposed to be free software, and Java (at least, Sun's version) is not free software. I don't have java installed, nor am I even quite sure how to install java on my Debian system, since Sun's licensing forced Debian to remove java even from their non-free archives! There is kaffe (and gjc), but those aren't quite there yet.
How this will all play out, I'm not sure. Obviously, since you are closer to the Sun side, you see the forces pushing java as strong; I'm closer to the Debian side, so I see the forces opposing java as strong. The GNOME project as a whole is somewhere in the middle, though, and I'm not sure either one of us has the perspective to see where things will actually end up. Mono seems to have more active development than kaffe, but if kaffe development picks up, maybe that will balance things out and give java/kaffe the inside edge in GNOME. Or maybe Sun will come to their senses and license Java under a non-stupid license. We'll see.
On the other hand, you can also use any name you want in California, as long as you're not doing so for fraudulent purposes! So you should be able to give the police a name you made up on the spot, as long as you seriously intend that to be (one of) your name(s), and aren't trying to (e.g.) hide your arrest record. Not that I'd try this bit of dubious legerdemain, given the average policeman's utter lack of humor.
Or to put it another way, the laws you linked to are about using a false identity. You can use any name you want as long as you're not pretending to be someone you aren't, or not be someone you are.
I saw the segment with Scott Richter, it was funny, and the only person made out to be a fool was Richter himself. The person who replaced you was teased a little ("What about the people who want spam? Aren't you hurting them?"), but has absolutely no reason to be sorry about the final result.
I might worry if the Daily Show wanted to interview me about a controversial subject, but for something as clearly one-sided as spam, I wouldn't hestitate to talk to them.
"Finding a non-Adobe Acrobat reader that is not itself the result of a violation of an Adobe IP claim [...] is a bit problematic."
No it's not! Adobe has deliberately made PDF a public format; they freely distribute the specs and encourage others to support the format. Finding (e.g.) xpdf is not a bit problematic - there's barely a Linux vendor out there who doesn't ship it. Even The Open Group (the guys who own the UNIX(tm) trademark) have an xpdf page. Getting it to run on your platform might be problematic if you don't run a Unixlike system, but that says more about that platform than about the format.
You can say whatever you like about Linux, and there's not a lot anyone can do about it.
Actually, that's not true. Because a lot of companies sell Linux, and rely on its good reputation to make sales, you can be sued for Trade Libel (Lanham Act) if you make blatantly false statements about Linux in an attempt to drive potential customers away. Case(s) in point: Red Hat v The SCO Group, and the IBM countersuit.
In fact, the biggest difference is that if you badmouth MSWindows, only MS really has standing to sue. If you badmouth Linux, you could potentially face thousands of suits from thousands of companies and individuals.
If you're talking PC video games, you are probably right (although you may be locking out the friends/relatives/whatnots of the gamers who sometimes like to buy birthday/xmas presents, and just want information). What really bugs me though is the companies that do console or board games and still assume that anyone who comes to their site has a huge screen and unlimited bandwidth. I know gamers that don't even own a general purpose computer, and have to visit friends or the library to get information about new releases, errata, etc.
So you're right; it depends on your audience. But make sure you actually know who your audience is. Stop and think about it before you make assumptions.
Anyway, my biggest peeve is websites designed for a fixed-size screen that are all-but-unusable at sizes greater than 1600x1200.:)
Some of them already have. It doesn't matter, as even the press understands that popup-blockers are also part of the free market. (Unlike many technologies, browsers are something that most people in the press use, and therefore, so are popup-blockers.)
Spammers have tried the "it saves trees, so it's good" line too, but that didn't impress anyone either, again because the press has to deal with spam. It's much easier to lie about something if the person you're talking to doesn't know anything about the topic under discussion (see, for example, SCO and the press). Lying to someone about a topic they know is much harder.
Not lazy (or not just lazy): more to the point, most people don't care! Most people want the service, but don't care about the fiddly details of how it works. If it comes with the system and works, why should they mess around looking for alternatives? If there's hundreds of books on it, why switch to something else, especially if you don't care?
At most places I've worked, DNS is a tiny part of what's going on in the organization. A critical part, but a tiny part. Often, there's no particular person assigned to maintain the DNS. Instead, it's simply a (small) part of the duties of the admin or ops team. And since it's a team responsibility, and the team members may change over time, better and easier to stick with something widely known (e.g. bind). Especially since nobody really cares, as long as it works.
Lots of places I've worked at have had several dedicated email adminstrators, and email is their primary (only) responsibility, so they care! So alternate email systems like qmail and postfix and whatnot are not uncommon. But DNS is just something that most people don't care about as long as it works.
Me, I use/etc/hosts files, at least at home, where I am in charge, and there's barely a half-dozen machines to worry about.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect (though I can't provide hard numbers to prove it) that the majority of the legitimate traffic on bittorrent is concerts and recordings by artists that allow taping and trading. Not just the domain of classic "hippie" bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish any more, this now includes bands as diverse as the Butthole Surfers, Charlie Hunter, They Might Be Giants and the Funky Meters (the "other" Neville Brother's band).
I don't know about the percentages, but most (or at least many) BT users know that it's much easier to track down the users (because of centralized trackers), which tends to mildly discourage the illegitimate users, leading to a probably higher percentage of legitimate users even during regular times.
:)
And Linux CDs aren't the only legitimate use of BT. Fans of "Bands That Allow Taping" (BTAT) prefer lossless formats (shn, flac) for distributing their legitimate concert recordings, and tend to use bittorrent. Since the individual songs are five times larger (due to lossless compression), and since these concerts tend to be distributed as a whole, rather than song-at-a-time, that's a fair amount of traffic involved. And since the audience for BTAT tend to be somewhat older on average (discounting a few anomolies like Jason Mraz), there's not going to be as much seasonal variation.
When Linux Journal did an article about bittorrent last year, their example image showed a legitimate download of a Widespread Panic concert, not a Linux distro. The Etree BT tracker includes a lot of stuff from the usual suspects (Grateful Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews), but also a fair amount of interest to different audiences (They Might Be Giants, Primus/Les Claypool, Ween, Tenacious D, Butthole Surfers, Charlie Hunter, etc.).
Twenty million Deadheads may be a drop in the bucket compared to the Kazaa "community", but when you consider that those Deadheads are sharing sets of files that are one to five hundred times as large as the individual files that are shared on Kazaa, and factor in the fans of nearly 1000 other bands that also allow taping/trading, and you might be starting to talk an almost measurable percentage of BT traffic. It might be more than you think. Maybe. Possibly.
You are mistaken on this point. The FSF does not interpret the GPL to mean anything about linkage. The FSF interprets copyright law as saying that linkage constitutes copyright derivation. You may disagree, but that doesn't change the fact that the GPL is solely a defense against charges of copyright violation!
If you violate the GPL, then the GPL no longer applies to you. But accepting the GPL is voluntary. If what you do with the GPL'd code is not violating copyright law, then the GPL is irrelevant, and you can argue that you never accepted it. If what you do with the GPL'd code does violate copyright law, then your only possible defense is that the GPL granted you the right to do what you did (which is only true if you adhered to its terms). But the GPL can never take away rights, by definition, because it exists solely as a defense against charges of copyright violation. If there is no possibility of copyright infringement, the GPL is moot.
Trusts were evil business cartels.
I don't know if I agree about the evil part - I'm not sure that cartels are any more implicitly evil than monopolies. Especially cartels which aren't monopolies, and even more especially cartels founded in response to monopolies or the threat of monopoly.
But your etymology seems sound. Thanks for the tip and the link.
Somewhere around 90% of MS's operating system sales are to other companies, called OEMs, or Original Equipment Manufacturers. Companies like HP and IBM and Dell and Gateway and a horde of smaller vendors. It's MS's actual customers, the OEMs, who were complaining about their strong-arm tactics and abusive pricing schemes and whatnot. (Although many of the OEMs complained quietly, for fear of offending the great and mighty MS who could crush them like a bug and triple the overall costs of their systems on a whim.) The whole reason the USDOJ got involved with the question of browsers is that OEMs wanted to offer their customers a choice between Netscape and IE (this was, if you'll recall, back when Netscape dominated the market), and MS said, "try it and we'll remove your generative organs with a rusty spoon."
Anyway, the real point is not that MS has a "more real" monopoly or something. The big issue is that MS abuses their monopoly. Gratuitously and incessantly. When you have a monopoly, free market rules no longer apply (by definition), so the market has to trust in your good behavior. Which is why abuse of monopoly is called "anti-trust".
I'm down to about four cheesy SF novels a week now. Back when I was in school (late seventies), it was more like ten. That's a pretty sharp decline, I suppose. :)
My local library doesnt carry any star trek or HGTTG books.
I won't comment on your choice of reading material, since mine is pretty dubious too. But...have you asked them about it? How are they to know that local people are interested in these books if local people don't ask them about these books? Most librarians would rather carry books that get used and read than books that sit around gathering dust, but won't know what you want unless you tell them.
Also, most libraries have agreements to share books with other libraries in the area, and you can usually check for books you're interested in through the library computer system. Maybe your local library doesn't have the books you want, but maybe the one in the next town does, and will happily ship them over for you if you just ask.
The claim also contains the assumption that applications are CPU-bound. All the recompiling in the world won't make something go faster if it's waiting on a disk or a UART or a NIC. Many applications are fast enough anyway -- who cares if /bin/cat gets a 2% improvement of its CPU use? I bet I could add a 20 microsecond gratuitous delay in the main loop of cat, and not noticably affect its performance!
That said, the kinds of things I would like to have extra-optimized for speed are generally big, huge, complicated things that take forever to compile. Like an Xserver. And that's definitely where distcc could come in handy.
It doesn't say "children's songs", it says, "for the whole family". I know - that's usually shorthand for "for kids", but in this case, it seems, they meant it. I think it is at easily their best album since Flood, and it might even be better.
Think of the song Particle Man. You could call that a kid's song - it's bouncy and fun, and kids love it. But it's quirky and odd enough to keep adults entertained too. No! is like that, except more so, and it's got a lot more depth and range.
But don't just take my word for it! If you have flash, you can judge for yourself. They have samples of most of the songs at www.giantkid.net. (The CD version of the album also includes a much more extensive version of the same flash game/thingie.)
It's not just so much that MS is a monopoly, or even the fact that they've violated anti-trust laws to illegally maintain and extend their monopoly (for having a monopoly is not actually wrong in and of itself). It's the fact that there was a consent decree (stemming from their monopoly abuse) specifically forbidding them from bundling more apps with their system. (Unfortunately, it had a loophole for "apps necessary for the operation of the system", which MS abuses on a regular basis, but that's a side issue.)
MS can't ship "stacks and stacks of applications" because they're being punished! They were bad, and they have to go sit in a corner! If they'd stop being bad, then maybe their punishment would stop sometime (but if they weren't being bad, they might not want to bundle apps quite so much).
It's like a guy in jail whining, "other people can go to the movies anytime they want without getting in trouble, but I can't - it's not FAA-I-I-R!" Ya did the crime, now do yer time and shaddup!
One of my associates emailed me to chide me - as the Debian tcl/tk maintainer I should know better - tcl has been byte-compiled since 8.0. I plead old age, early morning posting, and insufficient coffee. :)
Enlightened script languages, I would say.
Technically, you're wrong; they're byte-compiled (except maybe tcl). But I understand what you mean. But so what? They're pretty damn enlightened! Check out, e.g., Zope before you sneer at python.
All this extra code allows the programs to be clearer, better organized.
By that logic, assembly language programs must be the clearest and best organized programs of all.
> people who usually don't have a clue what else is out there.
Maybe you?
Well, in nearly 25 years as a professional software developer, I have used (off the top of my head) assembler, basic, C, C++, forth, java, lisp, pascal, perl, python, shell and tcl, and dabbled in ADA, APL, eiffel, prolog, ruby, smalltalk, snobol and more. The biggest gap in my education is probably the functional languages like OCaml and Haskell. I think I have at least a bit of an idea what's out there. How 'bout you?
Microsoft has never needed a decent marketing team -- they were handed their monopoly on a silver platter by IBM. Since then, their business strategy has had more to do with intimidating OEMs than appealing to customers. Still, I don't think their office ads are as bad or dumb as their choice of a bug as the spokesmodel for MSN! :)
Portable, standardized language and interfaces are what gives Java it's power.
:)
Yeah, because gods know that no other language has ever been portable or standardized.
Unless protected by a strong consortium [...] Java would rapidly fragment into several code forks
Just as has happened with those other highly portable, standardized, cross-platform languages like Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, etc. (Oh wait, I forgot, there are no other portable, standardized, cross-platform languages, my mistake.) Yeah, clearly, every language that isn't under the rigid control of corporate-owned constortia is instantly subject to massive forking by the dangerous denizens of the dark side. Open-sourcing computer languages makes the baby jebus cry!
Java's embedded documentation [...]
Oh, yeah, too bad the perl coders couldn't come up with something like that years before java even existed! Come to think of it, I think the perl guys borrowed it from lisp! Oh well, it's clearly an advantage of Java and of no other language!
And the best part about using java? It's low-level C/C++-like syntax and data structures means that you get to write many times more lines of code than you would need to to code the equivalent in tcl or perl or python. Why is that good? More money for programmers to write and (especially) to maintain all that extra code!
Java, with the support costs of a low level language, the run-time overheads of a high-level one, and the benefits of neither, is clearly the best choice. Just try it, and you'll be sayin', "Wow! I gotta get me some o' dat!"
Whoops, sorry, was I waxing sarcastic again?
Oh yeah, and all three of those other languages I mentioned have all settled on a single cross-platform GUI toolkit to share (Tk). How many GUI toolkits are fighting for dominance in the java world these days? I stopped counting after three. Boy, that there's some good standardization!
Aaaanyway, I don't want to bash java too hard. I actually think it's a pretty decent language overall. I just get so tired of people who think it's God's Gift; people who usually don't have a clue what else is out there. Java's ok, but it ain't All That!
So, basically, they "discovered" this vulnerability after the major browser vendors had already fixed it!?! Wow, that is an amazing "discovery!" How do they do it? Y'know, next, maybe they can discover something really amazing and new, like, say, America! Or F=MA! :)
That means they don't get to drop something just because they don't like it (as ISP's routinely do with SPAM and such).
Geeze, the one spelling (all-caps) that Hormel has reserved for itself, and you insist on using it inappropriately! Get it straight! Unsolicited commercial email and the like may be spam or Spam or even sP4m, but is never SPAM! SPAM is the trademark for a tinned meat product. ISPs don't routinely do anything with SPAM, but they may routinely filter or block spam.
Aside from the fact that you left out a few motivations, I agree. (And you didn't deserve the "troll" mod, IMO.) The motivations of software developers are much like the motivations of everyone else: money, sex, power, prestige, frustration, curiousity, comfort, etc.[*] There's no mystery here--developers are people, and, generally, have the same motivations as other people.
The quote, "[o]ther than Linux, all the other open-source projects move along at a rate best described as glacial," is both false and rather stupid, but that's a separate issue. Open source projects, like all projects, move at a variety of rates, some fast, some slow. I'm a little surprised that Dvorak said that, since he's usually not quite that clueless, but then I'm also not quite sure how his article ties into the question of the motivations of developers.
[*] "Money, sex, power and elephants," is the curious list proposed by Barrayaran ImpSec Chief Simon Illyan.
However, Java is becoming more viable for GNOME
I seriously question that statement, since GNOME is supposed to be free software, and Java (at least, Sun's version) is not free software. I don't have java installed, nor am I even quite sure how to install java on my Debian system, since Sun's licensing forced Debian to remove java even from their non-free archives! There is kaffe (and gjc), but those aren't quite there yet.
How this will all play out, I'm not sure. Obviously, since you are closer to the Sun side, you see the forces pushing java as strong; I'm closer to the Debian side, so I see the forces opposing java as strong. The GNOME project as a whole is somewhere in the middle, though, and I'm not sure either one of us has the perspective to see where things will actually end up. Mono seems to have more active development than kaffe, but if kaffe development picks up, maybe that will balance things out and give java/kaffe the inside edge in GNOME. Or maybe Sun will come to their senses and license Java under a non-stupid license. We'll see.
On the other hand, you can also use any name you want in California, as long as you're not doing so for fraudulent purposes! So you should be able to give the police a name you made up on the spot, as long as you seriously intend that to be (one of) your name(s), and aren't trying to (e.g.) hide your arrest record. Not that I'd try this bit of dubious legerdemain, given the average policeman's utter lack of humor.
Or to put it another way, the laws you linked to are about using a false identity. You can use any name you want as long as you're not pretending to be someone you aren't, or not be someone you are.
I saw the segment with Scott Richter, it was funny, and the only person made out to be a fool was Richter himself. The person who replaced you was teased a little ("What about the people who want spam? Aren't you hurting them?"), but has absolutely no reason to be sorry about the final result.
I might worry if the Daily Show wanted to interview me about a controversial subject, but for something as clearly one-sided as spam, I wouldn't hestitate to talk to them.
"Finding a non-Adobe Acrobat reader that is not itself the result of a violation of an Adobe IP claim [...] is a bit problematic."
No it's not! Adobe has deliberately made PDF a public format; they freely distribute the specs and encourage others to support the format. Finding (e.g.) xpdf is not a bit problematic - there's barely a Linux vendor out there who doesn't ship it. Even The Open Group (the guys who own the UNIX(tm) trademark) have an xpdf page. Getting it to run on your platform might be problematic if you don't run a Unixlike system, but that says more about that platform than about the format.
You can say whatever you like about Linux, and there's not a lot anyone can do about it.
Actually, that's not true. Because a lot of companies sell Linux, and rely on its good reputation to make sales, you can be sued for Trade Libel (Lanham Act) if you make blatantly false statements about Linux in an attempt to drive potential customers away. Case(s) in point: Red Hat v The SCO Group, and the IBM countersuit.
In fact, the biggest difference is that if you badmouth MSWindows, only MS really has standing to sue. If you badmouth Linux, you could potentially face thousands of suits from thousands of companies and individuals.
If you're talking PC video games, you are probably right (although you may be locking out the friends/relatives/whatnots of the gamers who sometimes like to buy birthday/xmas presents, and just want information). What really bugs me though is the companies that do console or board games and still assume that anyone who comes to their site has a huge screen and unlimited bandwidth. I know gamers that don't even own a general purpose computer, and have to visit friends or the library to get information about new releases, errata, etc.
:)
So you're right; it depends on your audience. But make sure you actually know who your audience is. Stop and think about it before you make assumptions.
Anyway, my biggest peeve is websites designed for a fixed-size screen that are all-but-unusable at sizes greater than 1600x1200.
Some of them already have. It doesn't matter, as even the press understands that popup-blockers are also part of the free market. (Unlike many technologies, browsers are something that most people in the press use, and therefore, so are popup-blockers.)
Spammers have tried the "it saves trees, so it's good" line too, but that didn't impress anyone either, again because the press has to deal with spam. It's much easier to lie about something if the person you're talking to doesn't know anything about the topic under discussion (see, for example, SCO and the press). Lying to someone about a topic they know is much harder.
Not lazy (or not just lazy): more to the point, most people don't care! Most people want the service, but don't care about the fiddly details of how it works. If it comes with the system and works, why should they mess around looking for alternatives? If there's hundreds of books on it, why switch to something else, especially if you don't care?
/etc/hosts files, at least at home, where I am in charge, and there's barely a half-dozen machines to worry about. :)
At most places I've worked, DNS is a tiny part of what's going on in the organization. A critical part, but a tiny part. Often, there's no particular person assigned to maintain the DNS. Instead, it's simply a (small) part of the duties of the admin or ops team. And since it's a team responsibility, and the team members may change over time, better and easier to stick with something widely known (e.g. bind). Especially since nobody really cares, as long as it works.
Lots of places I've worked at have had several dedicated email adminstrators, and email is their primary (only) responsibility, so they care! So alternate email systems like qmail and postfix and whatnot are not uncommon. But DNS is just something that most people don't care about as long as it works.
Me, I use