Linux was written from scratch, it isn't a fork of BSD in any sense other than in some cases it presents the same general Unix-y API
The capacity for multiple users is a security hole? Totally untrue; it's possible to set up a very secure multiuser box, and it probably would be even easier on a PDA since you're not going to want to run a bunch of daemons.
There is a simple solution for all of these sole proprietorship/family businesses: incorporate. A corporation lives on past the death of one person, and has other tax breaks too. No 55% tax at any single point in time. If my college roommate could incorporate in order to get a better deal on school supplies, it can't be too tough for a million-dollar business to do so.
People that complain about the estate tax just haven't realized yet that they are using the wrong legal tools to run their business.
Although I immediately liked the idea of turning a bad law against itself, I think Aimster might have some problems. Under their privacy/security section, they say that all materials exchanged are copyrighted and then encrypted, so that breaking the encryption is a DMCA violation. My question is: does this only apply to material which you own the copyright to and then you encrypt?
That is, is there a difference between sharing a document for collaboration over Aimster which I and my friends are co-writing, and sharing mp3s over Aimster which are probably copyright Warner Bros. or something like that. So if the fine folks at copyright.net (how unlike copyleft.net!) crack the encryption to find that I'm swapping mp3s, I might not be able to use the DMCA as my defense since the encryption was not a protection service used by the copyright owners.
Of course, if the RIAA cracks the encryption to find a document that is copyrighted by me, then I really could go after them. It's kind of a gamble on their part as to whom they think certain material is copyrighted by. Unfortunately, they have enough money that they could probably just crack 'em all and suffer through a few DMCA lawsuits, since they probably have much better lawyers than Joe MP3-Ripper.
I think his point was really the opposite: that high-speed cable access is a telecom service, and thus regulatable by the FCC. The big telcos are arguing that it is an information service, which apparently makes it unregulatable. An information service is like your library, where they actually store knowledge. A telecommunications service basically provides bandwidth between points A and B, rather than any specific information.
The whole slant of the article was that deregulation hasn't really worked because the government hasn't followed up sufficiently to make the big telecoms open up their networks. The question that I have is: are they really being forced to sell access to 3rd-party ISPs at a loss? It seems like that's the crux of the argument. Nobody should be required to sell access to their infrastructure at a loss, but if the price is fair-market then there shouldn't be a problem.
It took me
probably a hour and a half just to delete them all... there was far too many for a simple rm
logname.1* -f or something like that, had to go through and try to pick out small enough chunks
to make it work.
Your eyes and mucous membranes willl probably go, though, and you will probably get pretty good pressure bruises on the surface of your skin. Exploding might be more pleasant:)
Well, in order to get files on or off of someone else's share, your computer has to send them a request and they have to acknowledge it by either sending you files, or storing your files. So while there may be no sign, it is the case that your permission was asked, and you agreed to the transaction. Sort of like if a door-to-door salesman came by while you were at work, asked to come in, and your no-good brother-in-law invited him in.
The answer is, of course, throw out that lousy bum Windows:)
It is (for copyrighted materials) under our legal system, and for good reasons.
No, it's not. Unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material is illegal under current law, but it is not "theft", and it is most certainly not "piracy". Theft would imply that the original owner of the work no longer possesses it, which is not the case. And piracy would be hijacking a truck on its way from RIAA HQ to your local Sam Goody, but I digress:)
Nobody really questioned this
arrangement until it became effortless for ordinary people to violate copyright on a massive scale,
at which point suddenly everyone decided they wouldn't obey an inconvenient law.
I actually have no problems with copyright (well, pre-DMCA anyway), but I would point out the hole in your argument - under a democracy or some form of representative government, why shouldn't the laws change if the majority feels that they should, assuming that the change is constitutional? I'm not convinced that it's the end of the world if the average guy on the street gets things to go his way every once in a while. As technology changes, regular people discover new and better ways to live their lives, and if those new ways require changes to the law, then so be it.
Obviously you have to balance this against the rights of the minority - for example, we couldn't really revert to being a slaveowning society even if the majority wanted to. But the draconian way that copyright has been enforced against the common man may well have to be rethought, lest the whole concept of copyright fall by the wayside.
That's not a troll, though, it's just not a very good rebuttal of a previous post. You have to distinguish between posts which just didn't happen to make a good argument, and posts which were deliberately trying to set off an argument. The former is "overrated" at worst, the latter is "troll" or "flamebait".
I didn't see anything wrong with the comment myself, although I wouldn't have moderated it up either.
I've also seen good posts marked as trolls recently. I think there may have been some moderation abuse going on for the past week or two.
That isn't really correct; you can run the Gimp just fine without Gnome. You can't run it without gtk+, but then again you don't complain about having to use Motif/Lesstif to run apps that require that toolkit, right? Gimp runs just fine on HP-UX with CDE, for example, as long as I have gtk+.
It was originally written for Windows because the UDF filesystem was not fully supported under Linux at the time. The goal was to provide a Linux DVD player.
No. No. NO. All religions will teach you that you MUST respect the views of others. You have
NO right to disrespect me, and this is the cause of so much strife in the world.
Are you living in some sort of parallel universe? On the planet I'm from, people have huge wars over religion, often torturing and killing other people because they worship a different god, or worship the same god in a slightly different way. If those are religious teachings, then I want no part of religion. Religious tolerance is a great ideal, but there are plenty of worldwide religions which do not have a history of practicing religious tolerance. You even go on to give examples of religions which are intolerant, so I'm afraid I can't take your argument very seriously.
Also, it is still possible to be religiously tolerant but disagree with a particular religion. For example, I have the freedom of speech to point out that I disagree with the way women are treated in some hard-line Islamic countries. I don't hate Muslims or wish to destroy them, but I will point out my disagreement with their views in some regards. This is a rational viewpoint for me to have IMHO, but one which you would silence in the name of "religious tolerance". Why should I be prevented from speaking just because it makes some people uncomfortable? And what if it turns out that a religion really was wrong about something; won't you feel bad about having prevented me from speaking then?
Once you
accept that society is an organism, you will understand why sometimes individuals need to be
silenced for the good of the group as a whole. Its like removing a cancerous tumor.
I disagree on the basis that society is better off when views are expressed and debated openly. I'd much rather have the local Nazis out on street corners where people can point and laugh at them (I'd encourage throwing vegetables too, but that's just me) rather than hiding from the government in some basement plotting to blow up a court house. By suppressing the parts of society that you don't like, you just make them turn their anger inwards and focus it more, becoming even more cancerous and harder to root out. Why risk that, when we can just laugh them out of town today and have it done with?
The problem is who is being censored. Currently far
too much freedom is given to right wingers (Insane NRA Gun nuts, pro-lifers, KKK Neo Nazis
etc) and not enough is focussed on more socially aware groups.
So what "socially aware" groups don't have the freedom to speak right now? Can you name some? Bonus question: did you mean "socially aware" in the sense of the People's Republic of China from your other post? (I'm still chuckling about that one, btw.) Heck, the last time I checked the communists were free to publish pamphlets, get on Oprah or the evening news, or hold rallies, just the same as the KKK, the NRA, or any other vocal and opinionated group.
Farbeit from me to interrupt a good rant, but isn't threatening to repost because you've got extra karma considered "abusing the mod system":)
But seriously, you've formed your opinion of Americans based on all the scary stories you've seen on/. and Jerry Springer, and somehow the Americans are myopic and intolerant? Lots of countries do dumb stuff and have dumb citizens, and unfortunately megacorporations are a global plague. True, the U.S. military has some issues, but then again, if you were spread all over the globe on a dwindling budget, you might shoot yourself (or the locals) in the foot from time to time as well. Almost any nation, magnified to the same position on the world stage, would have similar issues; probably the last nation to have so benignly controlled so much of the globe (in an economic, cultural, and/or political if not military sense) was Imperial Rome.
Not that that makes it OK, of course, I'm just trying to supply some perspective and exercize my native American argumentativeness (argumentativity?).
As others have pointed out the whole Constitutional amendment thing, I won't go into it.
In the same vein as the War Powers Act, though, my understanding (possible urban legend alert) was that President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War and it was never reinstated. This would probably be unconstitutional if true, although good luck fighting off anything like that in wartime. A nation at war is a whole different thing; when the survival of the whole country is at stake, people will give up almost any right that might adversely affect the war effort. That being said, the U.S. is still probably more liberal than some other countries while in the middle of a war, mostly from never having a serious fear of invasion.
I find it hard to believe that you can jump from "universal human rights" to the People's Republic of China in the same breath, are you feeling OK after that contortion? Of course human rights don't come into being at will; they must be wrested from the powerful and the wealthy with great struggle, bought often in blood. Like all those students that were killed in that socially advanced nation of China, remember?
The answer to speech which is disrespectful of your culture or religion is not censorship, but simply more speech from your group. I have a right to not respect your group, and you have a right to not respect mine. We both get to tell as many interested passersby about it as we can, and the population decides who's nuts.
As soon as government starts telling people which religions we can't poke fun at, there might as well be a state-sponsored religion. And what happens when your government changes from being pro-your group to being anti-your group? Are you quite prepared to muzzle your religious speech at that point? Remember, it's in the interests of social order...
If you don't like the amount of speech in the U.S., you're quite welcome to move to China, Iran, or wherever. It's possible that they may be more "socially advanced", in that the poor and the old are better cared for; but that's really an issue orthogonal to the freedom of speech. I'm not about to give up my rights to laugh at other people's wacky gods, especially if I'm of the opinion that those gods don't exist.
Woops, was that disrespectful? Get used to it, buddy.
One quibble: the issue is not what webster's defines a cartel as, but what the law and legal precedents have defined a cartel as. I'm not sure how different that is, but I can tell you that not every cartel gets zapped by the government.
I think you are using "fact" in a rather larger sense than I thought you were. It is probably unquestionable that there are many kinds of life forms, but that is not the fact of evolution. It is not unquestionable that all life is evolved from other life forms, which you stated as equivalent to the fact of evolution. The fact that there have been two observed instances of this occurring, and that there is abundant evidence (fossil and biological) that this has happened in the past for other life forms, does not prove that all life is evolved from other life forms or even that this is the preferred mode of generation of new species.
We can generalize from specific instances to the general case of life forms, and I agree with that generalization and find it the best way yet to explain the supporting evidence of evolution, but even a vast multiplicity of data points does not make something a fact. As I pointed out before, there were millions of data points of Newtonian physics available in 1900, but all of that data did not make Newtonian physics a fact, and eventually the theory was modified as new data was discovered. So it will probably be with evolution as well as with the theory of natural selection. In the worst case, we might determine that evolution has not in fact occurred, but things just looked so much like what we though evolution would look like that we were fooled, like the Martian canals. I don't think this is too likely, but to close off the possibility is to substitute faith for the scientific method.
I like evolution as much as or more than the next guy, but I'm extremely unwilling to chalk up anything determined through science as "fact" because of the many times that the "facts" have changed in the past. Just call it a good theory, the best theory that we currently have, and it's good enough for me.
I agree with your fervor, but you are muddying the waters here. Evolution is not a fact, is it a theory about how things work. It happens to be the best theory so far on the basis of the evidence found and the predictions that can be made from it, but it remains a theory. The next step up from theory is to become a natural law, which is a theory that we're really really certain of. Even a natural law isn't necessarily considered to be a "fact", though.
I mean, you wouldn't want to be one of the folks in 1900 claiming that Newtonian physics is not a theory, it's a fact, right? There's always room for new evidence to change the interpretation or the substance of an older theory (quantum physics, for example).
Bottom line: people who don't agree with evolution will call it a "theory" as if that shows a lack of proof. In scientific terms, a "theory" is pretty damn good. If we weren't so sure about evolution, it would be a "hypothesis" instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that was a huge troll:
There is a simple solution for all of these sole proprietorship/family businesses: incorporate. A corporation lives on past the death of one person, and has other tax breaks too. No 55% tax at any single point in time. If my college roommate could incorporate in order to get a better deal on school supplies, it can't be too tough for a million-dollar business to do so.
People that complain about the estate tax just haven't realized yet that they are using the wrong legal tools to run their business.
Although I immediately liked the idea of turning a bad law against itself, I think Aimster might have some problems. Under their privacy/security section, they say that all materials exchanged are copyrighted and then encrypted, so that breaking the encryption is a DMCA violation. My question is: does this only apply to material which you own the copyright to and then you encrypt?
That is, is there a difference between sharing a document for collaboration over Aimster which I and my friends are co-writing, and sharing mp3s over Aimster which are probably copyright Warner Bros. or something like that. So if the fine folks at copyright.net (how unlike copyleft.net!) crack the encryption to find that I'm swapping mp3s, I might not be able to use the DMCA as my defense since the encryption was not a protection service used by the copyright owners.
Of course, if the RIAA cracks the encryption to find a document that is copyrighted by me, then I really could go after them. It's kind of a gamble on their part as to whom they think certain material is copyrighted by. Unfortunately, they have enough money that they could probably just crack 'em all and suffer through a few DMCA lawsuits, since they probably have much better lawyers than Joe MP3-Ripper.
I think his point was really the opposite: that high-speed cable access is a telecom service, and thus regulatable by the FCC. The big telcos are arguing that it is an information service, which apparently makes it unregulatable. An information service is like your library, where they actually store knowledge. A telecommunications service basically provides bandwidth between points A and B, rather than any specific information.
The whole slant of the article was that deregulation hasn't really worked because the government hasn't followed up sufficiently to make the big telecoms open up their networks. The question that I have is: are they really being forced to sell access to 3rd-party ISPs at a loss? It seems like that's the crux of the argument. Nobody should be required to sell access to their infrastructure at a loss, but if the price is fair-market then there shouldn't be a problem.
Scully: I'll start the autopsies...
Just a tip: xargs is your friend.
ls logname.1* | xargs rm -f
Works with any size directory.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tape...
(BTW, to whom should I attribute this? I can't remember where I heard this.)
Your eyes and mucous membranes willl probably go, though, and you will probably get pretty good pressure bruises on the surface of your skin. Exploding might be more pleasant :)
Don't forget eMars.com!
Well, in order to get files on or off of someone else's share, your computer has to send them a request and they have to acknowledge it by either sending you files, or storing your files. So while there may be no sign, it is the case that your permission was asked, and you agreed to the transaction. Sort of like if a door-to-door salesman came by while you were at work, asked to come in, and your no-good brother-in-law invited him in.
The answer is, of course, throw out that lousy bum Windows :)
No, it's not. Unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material is illegal under current law, but it is not "theft", and it is most certainly not "piracy". Theft would imply that the original owner of the work no longer possesses it, which is not the case. And piracy would be hijacking a truck on its way from RIAA HQ to your local Sam Goody, but I digress :)
I actually have no problems with copyright (well, pre-DMCA anyway), but I would point out the hole in your argument - under a democracy or some form of representative government, why shouldn't the laws change if the majority feels that they should, assuming that the change is constitutional? I'm not convinced that it's the end of the world if the average guy on the street gets things to go his way every once in a while. As technology changes, regular people discover new and better ways to live their lives, and if those new ways require changes to the law, then so be it.
Obviously you have to balance this against the rights of the minority - for example, we couldn't really revert to being a slaveowning society even if the majority wanted to. But the draconian way that copyright has been enforced against the common man may well have to be rethought, lest the whole concept of copyright fall by the wayside.
That's not a troll, though, it's just not a very good rebuttal of a previous post. You have to distinguish between posts which just didn't happen to make a good argument, and posts which were deliberately trying to set off an argument. The former is "overrated" at worst, the latter is "troll" or "flamebait".
I didn't see anything wrong with the comment myself, although I wouldn't have moderated it up either.
I've also seen good posts marked as trolls recently. I think there may have been some moderation abuse going on for the past week or two.
That isn't really correct; you can run the Gimp just fine without Gnome. You can't run it without gtk+, but then again you don't complain about having to use Motif/Lesstif to run apps that require that toolkit, right? Gimp runs just fine on HP-UX with CDE, for example, as long as I have gtk+.
I don't think this is correct, at least as regards to copyrights.
That one's much more important.
It was originally written for Windows because the UDF filesystem was not fully supported under Linux at the time. The goal was to provide a Linux DVD player.
Are you living in some sort of parallel universe? On the planet I'm from, people have huge wars over religion, often torturing and killing other people because they worship a different god, or worship the same god in a slightly different way. If those are religious teachings, then I want no part of religion. Religious tolerance is a great ideal, but there are plenty of worldwide religions which do not have a history of practicing religious tolerance. You even go on to give examples of religions which are intolerant, so I'm afraid I can't take your argument very seriously.
Also, it is still possible to be religiously tolerant but disagree with a particular religion. For example, I have the freedom of speech to point out that I disagree with the way women are treated in some hard-line Islamic countries. I don't hate Muslims or wish to destroy them, but I will point out my disagreement with their views in some regards. This is a rational viewpoint for me to have IMHO, but one which you would silence in the name of "religious tolerance". Why should I be prevented from speaking just because it makes some people uncomfortable? And what if it turns out that a religion really was wrong about something; won't you feel bad about having prevented me from speaking then?
I disagree on the basis that society is better off when views are expressed and debated openly. I'd much rather have the local Nazis out on street corners where people can point and laugh at them (I'd encourage throwing vegetables too, but that's just me) rather than hiding from the government in some basement plotting to blow up a court house. By suppressing the parts of society that you don't like, you just make them turn their anger inwards and focus it more, becoming even more cancerous and harder to root out. Why risk that, when we can just laugh them out of town today and have it done with?
So what "socially aware" groups don't have the freedom to speak right now? Can you name some? Bonus question: did you mean "socially aware" in the sense of the People's Republic of China from your other post? (I'm still chuckling about that one, btw.) Heck, the last time I checked the communists were free to publish pamphlets, get on Oprah or the evening news, or hold rallies, just the same as the KKK, the NRA, or any other vocal and opinionated group.
Farbeit from me to interrupt a good rant, but isn't threatening to repost because you've got extra karma considered "abusing the mod system" :)
But seriously, you've formed your opinion of Americans based on all the scary stories you've seen on /. and Jerry Springer, and somehow the Americans are myopic and intolerant? Lots of countries do dumb stuff and have dumb citizens, and unfortunately megacorporations are a global plague. True, the U.S. military has some issues, but then again, if you were spread all over the globe on a dwindling budget, you might shoot yourself (or the locals) in the foot from time to time as well. Almost any nation, magnified to the same position on the world stage, would have similar issues; probably the last nation to have so benignly controlled so much of the globe (in an economic, cultural, and/or political if not military sense) was Imperial Rome.
Not that that makes it OK, of course, I'm just trying to supply some perspective and exercize my native American argumentativeness (argumentativity?).
As others have pointed out the whole Constitutional amendment thing, I won't go into it.
In the same vein as the War Powers Act, though, my understanding (possible urban legend alert) was that President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War and it was never reinstated. This would probably be unconstitutional if true, although good luck fighting off anything like that in wartime. A nation at war is a whole different thing; when the survival of the whole country is at stake, people will give up almost any right that might adversely affect the war effort. That being said, the U.S. is still probably more liberal than some other countries while in the middle of a war, mostly from never having a serious fear of invasion.
I find it hard to believe that you can jump from "universal human rights" to the People's Republic of China in the same breath, are you feeling OK after that contortion? Of course human rights don't come into being at will; they must be wrested from the powerful and the wealthy with great struggle, bought often in blood. Like all those students that were killed in that socially advanced nation of China, remember?
The answer to speech which is disrespectful of your culture or religion is not censorship, but simply more speech from your group. I have a right to not respect your group, and you have a right to not respect mine. We both get to tell as many interested passersby about it as we can, and the population decides who's nuts.
As soon as government starts telling people which religions we can't poke fun at, there might as well be a state-sponsored religion. And what happens when your government changes from being pro-your group to being anti-your group? Are you quite prepared to muzzle your religious speech at that point? Remember, it's in the interests of social order...
If you don't like the amount of speech in the U.S., you're quite welcome to move to China, Iran, or wherever. It's possible that they may be more "socially advanced", in that the poor and the old are better cared for; but that's really an issue orthogonal to the freedom of speech. I'm not about to give up my rights to laugh at other people's wacky gods, especially if I'm of the opinion that those gods don't exist.
Woops, was that disrespectful? Get used to it, buddy.
I imagine in this case marketing had a hand too...
One quibble: the issue is not what webster's defines a cartel as, but what the law and legal precedents have defined a cartel as. I'm not sure how different that is, but I can tell you that not every cartel gets zapped by the government.
Wouldn't that be more like:
I. ALL YOUR TOAST ARE BELONG TO US!
(snicker)
I think you are using "fact" in a rather larger sense than I thought you were. It is probably unquestionable that there are many kinds of life forms, but that is not the fact of evolution. It is not unquestionable that all life is evolved from other life forms, which you stated as equivalent to the fact of evolution. The fact that there have been two observed instances of this occurring, and that there is abundant evidence (fossil and biological) that this has happened in the past for other life forms, does not prove that all life is evolved from other life forms or even that this is the preferred mode of generation of new species.
We can generalize from specific instances to the general case of life forms, and I agree with that generalization and find it the best way yet to explain the supporting evidence of evolution, but even a vast multiplicity of data points does not make something a fact. As I pointed out before, there were millions of data points of Newtonian physics available in 1900, but all of that data did not make Newtonian physics a fact, and eventually the theory was modified as new data was discovered. So it will probably be with evolution as well as with the theory of natural selection. In the worst case, we might determine that evolution has not in fact occurred, but things just looked so much like what we though evolution would look like that we were fooled, like the Martian canals. I don't think this is too likely, but to close off the possibility is to substitute faith for the scientific method.
I like evolution as much as or more than the next guy, but I'm extremely unwilling to chalk up anything determined through science as "fact" because of the many times that the "facts" have changed in the past. Just call it a good theory, the best theory that we currently have, and it's good enough for me.
No way man, my parents love me! She does think my deadbeat brother-in-law is an earthworm, though :)
I agree with your fervor, but you are muddying the waters here. Evolution is not a fact, is it a theory about how things work. It happens to be the best theory so far on the basis of the evidence found and the predictions that can be made from it, but it remains a theory. The next step up from theory is to become a natural law, which is a theory that we're really really certain of. Even a natural law isn't necessarily considered to be a "fact", though.
I mean, you wouldn't want to be one of the folks in 1900 claiming that Newtonian physics is not a theory, it's a fact, right? There's always room for new evidence to change the interpretation or the substance of an older theory (quantum physics, for example).
Bottom line: people who don't agree with evolution will call it a "theory" as if that shows a lack of proof. In scientific terms, a "theory" is pretty damn good. If we weren't so sure about evolution, it would be a "hypothesis" instead.