Wow! Nice to hear it from somebody who actually lives in one of the "socialist paradise" countries.
Very few people complained about healthcare in the US until Hillary Clinton riled people up, and the Leftist media picked up the ball and ran with it.
That's how it is with socialism--it always regresses people to the mean. So, if your country is a total wreck and people are dying from the common cold, socialism will do a great job of lifting them up to something better. The problem is that when it comes time to move on, it tends to leave you stuck at that level.
Obviously Canada, Sweden, Great Brittain, etc... are advanced enough that they need to inject a little market based reform into their systems. The problem is mostly psychological.
A private system tends to produce the occasional "train wreck". These wrecks make great TV--excellent fodder for the Leftist media to jump on and say "look! it's awful". However, when you step back and look at the big picture, you see that from a statistical standpoint it isn't bad. Socialism, OTOH, kills quietly. People on a "waiting list" don't go from house to house collecting money and drawing a lot of attention to themselves.
I have seen this happens in America when somebody is truly desparate. On several occasions I have stopped in at a mom-n-pop grocery, or even a chain store, and seen a jar out for somebody who needed an operation. Not all the time, mind you, but it does happen. You can call it "private socialism" if you like. The people here have an innate sense of when charity is called for, and when it isn't. It might be a little scary from time-to-time, but it works much better than some politicians would have you believe.
No, that's probably pretty accurate. The majority of Americans, especially those in "fly-over country" consider Bill Gates to be a hero.
Bill Gates pissed off the government elites by not paying attention to them. His enemies who knew how to "work the system" used that power to go after him. This is a fine example of why we need some kind of campaign finance reform (but not the version that was passed in the House a few days ago--it's got constitutional issues).
There are plenty of companies that engage in practices much worse than anything MS did, but they know how to grease the works.
If I were a short I'd be all over this. Only trouble with shorting is that it's too easy to get burned by people who know how to manipulate the market to the up side.
I mean, come on. How do you run what is essentially a banking, credit and escrow service and LOSE MONEY. These guys must be some kind of financial geniuses to pull that off.
Oh well, it's nice to know that the market can still be fleeced old-school. The only thing that's missing is a picture of some 20 year old millionaire.
Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot.
This simply won't do. We must have Campaign Finance Reform for the IT industry. Because Slashdot is receiving money from MS, they must be corrupt. Therefore, it should be illegal for MS to place ads 60 days before the release of a new product.
In all seriousness, if you only read Slashdot you might think that the DMCA is the only threat to free speech. Peal yourself away from the CRT a little bit and wake up to what a bunch of jerks we have in congress. It's like the constitution just fell of a high-wire, and fell through the first net. Now if the president signs this bill it will fall through the 2nd net, and if the Supreme Court doesn't wack it our freedom will fall into the abyss. You would never know that if you just read Slashdot.
This post paid for by the Radical National Committee to Criticize Politicians less than 60 days before an election.
I was thinking the same thing, but the OP has a point. Why not create a "Sourceforge attic" with an option to exclude the attic from searches? A project would go into the attic if it had less than a minimum number of downloads and/or changes for a period of 6 months.
The attic could be hosted on older, slower servers, or on a configuration that worked well under low demand. Or perhaps it could even be archived on CD or DVD and distributed to various mirrors.
Regardless of how it is maintained, old code is a valuable resource, even if it's just there to let people know about methods that have been tried and failed. How can we learn from mistakes if we can't *see* them?
This is the whole problem with ALL network TV, not just Fox. STOP SHOWING SPORTS ON NETWORK TV. There. Said it. Showing sports on network is a hold-over from the days when there were only 3 channels. Nowadays most people have cable, and the people that really like sports and don't have cable have satellite. I can understand showing sports when it can be scheduled properly, such as football games shown between 12 and 4PM when there is nothing on anyway. But sports should not pre-empt regular network programming as if it were some kind of disaster like the coronation of "dictator of the United States" during a tornado while the city burns down after an earthquake.
Agreed. I've still got a copy of MS Golf and Baseball that came with a PC, circa 1996. Never opened. Didn't even break the seal. I've been saving it for the next garage sale, and NO, I don't think it's morally wrong to sell stuff like that even when the EULA says you can't. That's because EULAs that prohibit separation of components run contrary to the way commerce has been conducted for thousands of years. This is part of that teen, tiny, little intersection of agreement between me and the AIP movement. I'm happy to see that a judge sees it the same way.
What kind of psychological impact will it have if a baby is brought to term without any of the rocking, singing, ooh-ah, coo-coo, dinner, conversation, love and life of the mother in close contact? An "artificial womb" will presumably be a dark, enclosed tank with little or no human contact. There is substantial evidence to indicate that prenatal stimulation is important. I wonder what kind of messed up people will come out of these chambers.
I Didn't Think It Was Possible. The "grim sci-fi future" is more gentle and humane than the present. Case in point: 7 of 9 is on a Borg cube and there is a drone in a maturation chamber. Despite heroic effort, she is unable to save it. The present: Regulations stipulate that human life be terminated, and scientists comply.
Yeah, I know there is no way we can stop this from happening... or do you mean to say "resistance is futile"?
The Smithsonian made at least one mistake which I pointed out here and later backed up with photos.
I visited the museum several months after the pictures were taken, and the mistake was still there. There was not even a piece of tape over it or anything. Now, I realize nobody likes to see tape over a sign in a museum, but are facts important or are they only concerned about appearances?
Then of course there is the possibility that Intel donated a lot of money to the museum. The Smithsonian has had some corporate entanglements lately. I'm as much for small government as anybody, but don't do it halfway. Either fund the museum fully so that it doesn't have to have corporate logos all over it, or totally defund it. If you visit the museum, you will see heavy involvement from the Discovery Channel and some other sponsors.
Then of course there is that other bit where they had a poll in the museum that was supposed to track approval ratings for politicians among museum vistors. I visited that a few times during the Clinton administration, and the numbers for Democratic leaders were all suspiciously pegged at 54%, as if they had throttled negative responses.
The fall in prestige and other management issues at the Smithsonian are well documented. The bottom line? I don't trust the Smithsonian. Sad but true.
Apu: "Here is the most intelligent tic-tac-toe game ever made!" <holding a
box of punch cards>
Bart: "What does....THIS card do?" <pulls one out>
Apu: "Oh, well." <throws box over his shoulder>
:)
Guys, guys, you're all missing the point. So is Henning. In response to the question "Is Open Source the solution or isn't it?" I answer with a resounding "Yes".:)
Examples where the proprietary model has excelled: Highly optimized code (Intel compiler) User friendliness (MacOS, Windows) Timeliness (Sun's original Java implementation--was any OSS project working on xp GUIs before Java?).
Examples where Open Source model has excelled: Portability (are there any platforms that don't support the JPEG libraries?) Endurance (LISP stuff from the 80s will never die). Security (OpenBSD or NSA's Linux).
Examples where proprietary has failed: Ongoing access and support for legacy products (Where can I legally buy MS-DOS and get support for it?) Broken formats (WORD documents) Security (Outlook) Customer relations (product activation--no thank-you).
Examples where Open Source has failed: As a business model (Loki) Time to market (HURD, where are you?) Political entanglements (Say "GNU" before everything or you are not my friend).
When choosing, you have to look at the strengths and weaknesses and decide what is important to you. Sometimes that will lead to Open Source software as the correct choice. Other times it will lead to proprietary. If you are lucky you can mix-n-match That's why I love using MSVC (proprietary) to write Freeware (proprietary) that uses IJG code (Truly Free Open Source), and using the resulting app to generate frames that I pass through Gifsicle (GPL) to generate GIFs (proprietary format) to put on the Internet (Open Standards) that most people will view through IE (proprietary). And everybody is happy if they choose to be.
The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry.
OK, the "driving" part of the UI is OK, but most everything else is crap. 1985 Mustang: preset radio station by tuning radio, pulling out lever, and pushing it back in. The fact that I can still remember that is a strong indicator that this is a great UI.
1986 Buick: This car had an electronic radio, so the pull-n-push idea would no longer work. Solution? Tune radio, press "set" button, push button. Not as satisfying as the old mechanical pull-n-push, but intuitive enough.
1997 Buick: I have no idea. Honestly. I sat there in the care for half an hour yesterday and couldn't figure it out. There is an automated thing that will do it for you, which is supposed to be "easy". Just one problem: unless the radio can lock in on the station you want, it won't preset the station. Most of the stations I want (e.g., Anapolis based WHFS) have weaker signals and don't lock in. As a result, I have a dial full of crappy Top-40 presets. As far as I can tell there is no way to manually preset the stations. THIS SUCKS.
This is just one little gripe. Don't get me started on "idiot lights". God forbid anyone should actually know what their water temperature is. They might actually take the car in for service before it overheats and scours the cylinder bores.
A few years ago I did this little animated GIF of a snowball coming at the viewer. Last year I got a few deep links, but this year it really took off. At first, I reacted by renaming the file and switching it so that they saw another GIF that said "you need to give me credit and copy the image to your own server". Yes, that's right, the GIF is FREE TO USE as long as you give me credit and host it on your own server, but people were too lazy to fulfill even that simple request.
I contemplated several solutions, none of which were satisfactory. Eventually I decided to insert a (C) 2001 VRML3D.COM frame into the GIF so that any site using it would have my copyright notice in it. This doesn't solve the bandwidth problem, but at least I get credit.
I had been thinking that if I decided to do more GIFs, it would be a PiTA because I would have to find a way to protect my bandwidth. I mean, who wants to hit their hard transfer limit just because some yuk-a-puk wants to put a GIF on some message forum? Message forums that allow IMG tags are the *biggest* offenders.
Now if I ever decide to do more GIFs like this again, it's nice to know the law is on my side. The only question I have is the question a lot of others have too: What's a thumbnail? In the case of the animated GIFs, they are already thumbnail sized, but if a whole bunch of people start posting them on those stupid web forums it could suck quite a bit of bandwidth.
From the AP article: Given the volume of the comments received, Justice has asked the federal judge handling the case to allow it to publish them online and on CD-ROM.
All you have to do to make extra money is make comments about MS. In the case of Slashdot, every MS article brings in thousands of page views to generate ad revenue. In the case of the government they get to sell CD-ROMs. This must make workers at the Government Printing Office very happy.
I think maybe I should go into business writing s*** about MS. It's the next best thing to being MS.
it would save the tax payer MILLIONS of (£$E) every year, create a host of jobs
Ummm... contradiction anyone? I mean, I can see how it would save the taxpayers money initially, because they don't have to pay licensing fees. However, if it creates jobs in the government IT sector, how is that going to save them money? It will only save them money if the licensing fees exceed the salaries of the additional workers (this is the same old TCO debate, no need to re-hash it).
The other economic factor is the all-too-often neglected factor: boredom. From time-to-time, economies get bored, and then they become depressed because they have nothing to do. So far, the only answers we've found are socialism (New Deal, WPA, CCC, TVA etc.) and militarism (Nazis, Italian Fascists, etc.). Militarism has the virtue of providing a quick fix by reducing the number of job applicants and giving workers something to do after the conflict (rebuilding). Socialism has the virtue of killing people more slowly and in an apparently civilized manner (increased alcoholism and obesity of people on the doll, inferior socialized medecine, etc). The FDR brand of socialism was really not as bad as the wealth-transfer version used in the "great society". A lot of the New Deal projects actually produced work of enduring quality.
So, the real question is what will we *do* when Microsoft isn't there to tax and spend? Do you really think the government's tax and spend will be better than MSFTs? When was the last time MSFT plowed billions of dollars into a missile program? I say, down with the EU, up with MSFT. Buy your MSFT shares today, and join the Monetary Democratic Republic of Microsoft. Vote for officers that you can trust. They promise citizens that they will use your tax dollars to create cool things like the X-box, and not build any weapons systems unless their competitors force them too.
Do it today! Your company is calling you. Don't let the Germans get bored again!!!
Tuesday -- Slashdot. A Troll with an estimated 100 lines of flamebait strapped to his body detonated near the top of an article, moderating the troll down to -1. The blast incited a lenghty, fruitless debate over the merits of the GPL vs. BSD license, revived debates over the Karma cap, and widened nearby pages by up to 500 pixels. Fragments of sentences and even entire paragraphs were scattered over a wide area. Early estimates indicate that as many as 5 other users may have been modded down to -1, and that a larger number were modded down to 0.
Spokesman for the trolls and defacto Troll leader Yassir Arasplat denied involvement. "This may have been the work of Hagoatsex, The Bombastic C-Code, or one of the other militant Troll groups". Leaders and moderators of Slashdot insist that Arasplat must bear some responsability for the outburst. As you may recall, last year the Slashdot coalition government offered a deal that would have ceded large portions of Slashdot to Trolls. This was considered a very generous offer by most parties, but it stopped short of establishing a Trollestinian state.
Leaders of the United Web Sites and others pledged to bring an end to Karma Suicide Bombing. The United Web Sites pledged over $10 billion flooz, as well as its own Perl coders to help in the effort. An offer by MSN.com to send in coders was politely rejected, but the Slashdot coalition said it could not rule out anything in the future. Recent e-mailings of Perl code snippets to the Trolls demonstrate that they have no intention of posting anything other than mindless, disruptive, off-topic drivel.
You obviously have no idea how government works. The p2p problems they are ignoring now could be handled by a handful of agents in one small office, with ordinary computers. It might cost a few million dollars, but they have a decent chance of succeeding.
The wireless problem would require thousands of agents, special equipment, massive coordination through field-offices, and a massive multi-billion dollar budget. Success would be limited.
Nobody wants to work in a dingy little office with a small budget. But... going on the road with a lot of sexy hi-tech equipment subsidized by the tax payer? Who could resist? Why, I bet there could even be some new political appointments come out of this.
This is probably why systems like Freenet can (and perhaps should) be legislated out of existance.
It's understandable that networks want to have common carrier status. However, under a system like this, everybody can hide behind common carrier status, making everybody appear innocent when they really aren't.
As it stands, I think the FBI would seek to have the owner of the AP either control his content or shut down. Done wirelessly, it could also run afoul of the decency standards dictated by the FCC.
The bottom line is that you can't hide. If something is imporant enough to go to jail for, then by all means pull a Ghandi and do it. If you just want to "fight for your right to party" the government will be able to shut you down with the threat of a black mark on your record, and the only music being distributed on Freenet will be the sound of the world's smallest violin.
Actually, I hear that (Score 5: Troll) is really the coveted score around here.
How did that happen? I was under the impression that the description next to the mod points reflected the last moderation, and could therefore never be "Score 5: $Negative_Description".
If it's just a fluke on a few posts, I'll ignore it, but if someone can explain how that happens according to the "rules" I'll change my.sig.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! Nice to hear it from somebody who actually lives in one of the "socialist paradise" countries.
Very few people complained about healthcare in the US until Hillary Clinton riled people up, and the Leftist media picked up the ball and ran with it.
That's how it is with socialism--it always regresses people to the mean. So, if your country is a total wreck and people are dying from the common cold, socialism will do a great job of lifting them up to something better. The problem is that when it comes time to move on, it tends to leave you stuck at that level.
Obviously Canada, Sweden, Great Brittain, etc... are advanced enough that they need to inject a little market based reform into their systems. The problem is mostly psychological.
A private system tends to produce the occasional "train wreck". These wrecks make great TV--excellent fodder for the Leftist media to jump on and say "look! it's awful". However, when you step back and look at the big picture, you see that from a statistical standpoint it isn't bad. Socialism, OTOH, kills quietly. People on a "waiting list" don't go from house to house collecting money and drawing a lot of attention to themselves.
I have seen this happens in America when somebody is truly desparate. On several occasions I have stopped in at a mom-n-pop grocery, or even a chain store, and seen a jar out for somebody who needed an operation. Not all the time, mind you, but it does happen. You can call it "private socialism" if you like. The people here have an innate sense of when charity is called for, and when it isn't. It might be a little scary from time-to-time, but it works much better than some politicians would have you believe.
No, that's probably pretty accurate. The majority of Americans, especially those in "fly-over country" consider Bill Gates to be a hero.
Bill Gates pissed off the government elites by not paying attention to them. His enemies who knew how to "work the system" used that power to go after him. This is a fine example of why we need some kind of campaign finance reform (but not the version that was passed in the House a few days ago--it's got constitutional issues).
There are plenty of companies that engage in practices much worse than anything MS did, but they know how to grease the works.
If I were a short I'd be all over this. Only trouble with shorting is that it's too easy to get burned by people who know how to manipulate the market to the up side.
I mean, come on. How do you run what is essentially a banking, credit and escrow service and LOSE MONEY. These guys must be some kind of financial geniuses to pull that off.
Oh well, it's nice to know that the market can still be fleeced old-school. The only thing that's missing is a picture of some 20 year old millionaire.
Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot.
This simply won't do. We must have Campaign Finance Reform for the IT industry. Because Slashdot is receiving money from MS, they must be corrupt. Therefore, it should be illegal for MS to place ads 60 days before the release of a new product.
In all seriousness, if you only read Slashdot you might think that the DMCA is the only threat to free speech. Peal yourself away from the CRT a little bit and wake up to what a bunch of jerks we have in congress. It's like the constitution just fell of a high-wire, and fell through the first net. Now if the president signs this bill it will fall through the 2nd net, and if the Supreme Court doesn't wack it our freedom will fall into the abyss. You would never know that if you just read Slashdot.
This post paid for by the Radical National Committee to Criticize Politicians less than 60 days before an election.
I was thinking the same thing, but the OP has a point. Why not create a "Sourceforge attic" with an option to exclude the attic from searches? A project would go into the attic if it had less than a minimum number of downloads and/or changes for a period of 6 months.
The attic could be hosted on older, slower servers, or on a configuration that worked well under low demand. Or perhaps it could even be archived on CD or DVD and distributed to various mirrors.
Regardless of how it is maintained, old code is a valuable resource, even if it's just there to let people know about methods that have been tried and failed. How can we learn from mistakes if we can't *see* them?
This is the whole problem with ALL network TV, not just Fox. STOP SHOWING SPORTS ON NETWORK TV. There. Said it. Showing sports on network is a hold-over from the days when there were only 3 channels. Nowadays most people have cable, and the people that really like sports and don't have cable have satellite. I can understand showing sports when it can be scheduled properly, such as football games shown between 12 and 4PM when there is nothing on anyway. But sports should not pre-empt regular network programming as if it were some kind of disaster like the coronation of "dictator of the United States" during a tornado while the city burns down after an earthquake.
Agreed. I've still got a copy of MS Golf and Baseball that came with a PC, circa 1996. Never opened. Didn't even break the seal. I've been saving it for the next garage sale, and NO, I don't think it's morally wrong to sell stuff like that even when the EULA says you can't. That's because EULAs that prohibit separation of components run contrary to the way commerce has been conducted for thousands of years. This is part of that teen, tiny, little intersection of agreement between me and the AIP movement. I'm happy to see that a judge sees it the same way.
Look at me! I'm Larry Lessig!! I'm important!!!
No you're not.
Finally, an opportunity to burn some Karma and harp yet again on Slashdot's obsession with Lessig.
What kind of psychological impact will it have if a baby is brought to term without any of the rocking, singing, ooh-ah, coo-coo, dinner, conversation, love and life of the mother in close contact? An "artificial womb" will presumably be a dark, enclosed tank with little or no human contact. There is substantial evidence to indicate that prenatal stimulation is important. I wonder what kind of messed up people will come out of these chambers.
I Didn't Think It Was Possible. The "grim sci-fi future" is more gentle and humane than the present. Case in point: 7 of 9 is on a Borg cube and there is a drone in a maturation chamber. Despite heroic effort, she is unable to save it. The present: Regulations stipulate that human life be terminated, and scientists comply.
Yeah, I know there is no way we can stop this from happening... or do you mean to say "resistance is futile"?
The Smithsonian made at least one mistake which I pointed out here and later backed up with photos.
I visited the museum several months after the pictures were taken, and the mistake was still there. There was not even a piece of tape over it or anything. Now, I realize nobody likes to see tape over a sign in a museum, but are facts important or are they only concerned about appearances?
Then of course there is the possibility that Intel donated a lot of money to the museum. The Smithsonian has had some corporate entanglements lately. I'm as much for small government as anybody, but don't do it halfway. Either fund the museum fully so that it doesn't have to have corporate logos all over it, or totally defund it. If you visit the museum, you will see heavy involvement from the Discovery Channel and some other sponsors.
Then of course there is that other bit where they had a poll in the museum that was supposed to track approval ratings for politicians among museum vistors. I visited that a few times during the Clinton administration, and the numbers for Democratic leaders were all suspiciously pegged at 54%, as if they had throttled negative responses.
The fall in prestige and other management issues at the Smithsonian are well documented. The bottom line? I don't trust the Smithsonian. Sad but true.
Apu: "Here is the most intelligent tic-tac-toe game ever made!" <holding a
box of punch cards>
Bart: "What does....THIS card do?" <pulls one out>
Apu: "Oh, well." <throws box over his shoulder>
:)
Guys, guys, you're all missing the point. So is Henning. In response to the question "Is Open Source the solution or isn't it?" I answer with a resounding "Yes". :)
Examples where the proprietary model has excelled: Highly optimized code (Intel compiler) User friendliness (MacOS, Windows) Timeliness (Sun's original Java implementation--was any OSS project working on xp GUIs before Java?).
Examples where Open Source model has excelled: Portability (are there any platforms that don't support the JPEG libraries?) Endurance (LISP stuff from the 80s will never die). Security (OpenBSD or NSA's Linux).
Examples where proprietary has failed: Ongoing access and support for legacy products (Where can I legally buy MS-DOS and get support for it?) Broken formats (WORD documents) Security (Outlook) Customer relations (product activation--no thank-you).
Examples where Open Source has failed: As a business model (Loki) Time to market (HURD, where are you?) Political entanglements (Say "GNU" before everything or you are not my friend).
When choosing, you have to look at the strengths and weaknesses and decide what is important to you. Sometimes that will lead to Open Source software as the correct choice. Other times it will lead to proprietary. If you are lucky you can mix-n-match That's why I love using MSVC (proprietary) to write Freeware (proprietary) that uses IJG code (Truly Free Open Source), and using the resulting app to generate frames that I pass through Gifsicle (GPL) to generate GIFs (proprietary format) to put on the Internet (Open Standards) that most people will view through IE (proprietary). And everybody is happy if they choose to be.
OK, before anyone else points it out, I know all radios are electronic. I mean to say that it had a "digital tuner".
The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry.
OK, the "driving" part of the UI is OK, but most everything else is crap. 1985 Mustang: preset radio station by tuning radio, pulling out lever, and pushing it back in. The fact that I can still remember that is a strong indicator that this is a great UI.
1986 Buick: This car had an electronic radio, so the pull-n-push idea would no longer work. Solution? Tune radio, press "set" button, push button. Not as satisfying as the old mechanical pull-n-push, but intuitive enough.
1997 Buick: I have no idea. Honestly. I sat there in the care for half an hour yesterday and couldn't figure it out. There is an automated thing that will do it for you, which is supposed to be "easy". Just one problem: unless the radio can lock in on the station you want, it won't preset the station. Most of the stations I want (e.g., Anapolis based WHFS) have weaker signals and don't lock in. As a result, I have a dial full of crappy Top-40 presets. As far as I can tell there is no way to manually preset the stations. THIS SUCKS.
This is just one little gripe. Don't get me started on "idiot lights". God forbid anyone should actually know what their water temperature is. They might actually take the car in for service before it overheats and scours the cylinder bores.
A few years ago I did this little animated GIF of a snowball coming at the viewer. Last year I got a few deep links, but this year it really took off. At first, I reacted by renaming the file and switching it so that they saw another GIF that said "you need to give me credit and copy the image to your own server". Yes, that's right, the GIF is FREE TO USE as long as you give me credit and host it on your own server, but people were too lazy to fulfill even that simple request.
I contemplated several solutions, none of which were satisfactory. Eventually I decided to insert a (C) 2001 VRML3D.COM frame into the GIF so that any site using it would have my copyright notice in it. This doesn't solve the bandwidth problem, but at least I get credit.
I had been thinking that if I decided to do more GIFs, it would be a PiTA because I would have to find a way to protect my bandwidth. I mean, who wants to hit their hard transfer limit just because some yuk-a-puk wants to put a GIF on some message forum? Message forums that allow IMG tags are the *biggest* offenders.
Now if I ever decide to do more GIFs like this again, it's nice to know the law is on my side. The only question I have is the question a lot of others have too: What's a thumbnail? In the case of the animated GIFs, they are already thumbnail sized, but if a whole bunch of people start posting them on those stupid web forums it could suck quite a bit of bandwidth.
There was a lot of uncertainty as to whether or not it would happen.
From the AP article: Given the volume of the comments received, Justice has asked the federal judge handling the case to allow it to publish them online and on CD-ROM.
All you have to do to make extra money is make comments about MS. In the case of Slashdot, every MS article brings in thousands of page views to generate ad revenue. In the case of the government they get to sell CD-ROMs. This must make workers at the Government Printing Office very happy.
I think maybe I should go into business writing s*** about MS. It's the next best thing to being MS.
it would save the tax payer MILLIONS of (£$E) every year, create a host of jobs
Ummm... contradiction anyone? I mean, I can see how it would save the taxpayers money initially, because they don't have to pay licensing fees. However, if it creates jobs in the government IT sector, how is that going to save them money? It will only save them money if the licensing fees exceed the salaries of the additional workers (this is the same old TCO debate, no need to re-hash it).
The other economic factor is the all-too-often neglected factor: boredom. From time-to-time, economies get bored, and then they become depressed because they have nothing to do. So far, the only answers we've found are socialism (New Deal, WPA, CCC, TVA etc.) and militarism (Nazis, Italian Fascists, etc.). Militarism has the virtue of providing a quick fix by reducing the number of job applicants and giving workers something to do after the conflict (rebuilding). Socialism has the virtue of killing people more slowly and in an apparently civilized manner (increased alcoholism and obesity of people on the doll, inferior socialized medecine, etc). The FDR brand of socialism was really not as bad as the wealth-transfer version used in the "great society". A lot of the New Deal projects actually produced work of enduring quality.
So, the real question is what will we *do* when Microsoft isn't there to tax and spend? Do you really think the government's tax and spend will be better than MSFTs? When was the last time MSFT plowed billions of dollars into a missile program? I say, down with the EU, up with MSFT. Buy your MSFT shares today, and join the Monetary Democratic Republic of Microsoft. Vote for officers that you can trust. They promise citizens that they will use your tax dollars to create cool things like the X-box, and not build any weapons systems unless their competitors force them too.
Do it today! Your company is calling you. Don't let the Germans get bored again!!!
...of winning this contest, I wouldn't send the code to Google. I'd market it to Google's closest competitor.
WTF? Score 3? Now I'm not gonna get any virgins.
Karma Suicide Bomber.
Tuesday -- Slashdot. A Troll with an estimated 100 lines of flamebait strapped to his body detonated near the top of an article, moderating the troll down to -1. The blast incited a lenghty, fruitless debate over the merits of the GPL vs. BSD license, revived debates over the Karma cap, and widened nearby pages by up to 500 pixels. Fragments of sentences and even entire paragraphs were scattered over a wide area. Early estimates indicate that as many as 5 other users may have been modded down to -1, and that a larger number were modded down to 0.
Spokesman for the trolls and defacto Troll leader Yassir Arasplat denied involvement. "This may have been the work of Hagoatsex, The Bombastic C-Code, or one of the other militant Troll groups". Leaders and moderators of Slashdot insist that Arasplat must bear some responsability for the outburst. As you may recall, last year the Slashdot coalition government offered a deal that would have ceded large portions of Slashdot to Trolls. This was considered a very generous offer by most parties, but it stopped short of establishing a Trollestinian state.
Leaders of the United Web Sites and others pledged to bring an end to Karma Suicide Bombing. The United Web Sites pledged over $10 billion flooz, as well as its own Perl coders to help in the effort. An offer by MSN.com to send in coders was politely rejected, but the Slashdot coalition said it could not rule out anything in the future. Recent e-mailings of Perl code snippets to the Trolls demonstrate that they have no intention of posting anything other than mindless, disruptive, off-topic drivel.
You obviously have no idea how government works. The p2p problems they are ignoring now could be handled by a handful of agents in one small office, with ordinary computers. It might cost a few million dollars, but they have a decent chance of succeeding.
The wireless problem would require thousands of agents, special equipment, massive coordination through field-offices, and a massive multi-billion dollar budget. Success would be limited.
Nobody wants to work in a dingy little office with a small budget. But... going on the road with a lot of sexy hi-tech equipment subsidized by the tax payer? Who could resist? Why, I bet there could even be some new political appointments come out of this.
This is probably why systems like Freenet can (and perhaps should) be legislated out of existance.
It's understandable that networks want to have common carrier status. However, under a system like this, everybody can hide behind common carrier status, making everybody appear innocent when they really aren't.
As it stands, I think the FBI would seek to have the owner of the AP either control his content or shut down. Done wirelessly, it could also run afoul of the decency standards dictated by the FCC.
The bottom line is that you can't hide. If something is imporant enough to go to jail for, then by all means pull a Ghandi and do it. If you just want to "fight for your right to party" the government will be able to shut you down with the threat of a black mark on your record, and the only music being distributed on Freenet will be the sound of the world's smallest violin.
Actually, I hear that (Score 5: Troll) is really the coveted score around here.
How did that happen? I was under the impression that the description next to the mod points reflected the last moderation, and could therefore never be "Score 5: $Negative_Description".
If it's just a fluke on a few posts, I'll ignore it, but if someone can explain how that happens according to the "rules" I'll change my .sig.