You said, "US troops were committed to the Balkan's to protect the interests of Big Oil."
Did this thought spring, fully formed, from your mind as you posted, or is it in some way related to the objective Universe?
Is that an either/or question? You seem to be implying that somehow the things that "spring fully formed" to my mind as I post are somehow unrelated to the "objective Universe"... a stance I find perjorative at best.
If you're trying to ask where I got the idea, I have to say, I don't really remember. It was some years ago that I was acquainted with someone who presented me with some information that convinced me that it was a more realistic than I had otherwise heard. I haven't seen anything between now and then that convinced me otherwise, so it is my operative assumption that it is true.
I am intensely interested in politician's motivations.
Okay, well, you probably need to understand that I am not interested in politicians motives. I believe I fully understand what motivates them, and I further believe that what motivates them is not something that I care to see propagated in the world. In a word, it's Nasty, and should be removed from this so-called "objective Universe" you seem to believe in.
Since I believe I understand the movtivation, I also believe I understand the goal, and since I don't much care for that, either, I choose to pursue a study of what, exactly, allows their behaviour to continue down a path that no truly sane person can believe is beneficial to any group of persons except the politicians themselves.
A simplistic way of saying it might be to say that, if the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and that's just the way it is, I want to know Why. You are trying to draw me into a discussion of the How, and that is not of as much interest to me. I do not believe the motives of the politicians individually provides the mechanism or an explanation. I believe it to be a societal problem, whose answer lies in the "why" of societal dynamics.
As to breadth of scope: You seem to be focussed on individuals -- Bush, Clinton, etc -- I am much more interested in the forces they represent. They are, after all, just individual men. Rich, true, and wielding a great deal of power, but they do not own that power. They are simply using it to serve their own ends.
It is of interest to me to know what causes masses of people to yeild up their power to such men. In some cases it is simple threat. In other cases the owners of the power have been convinced of some thing or things that are patently not true. In other cases people lend their power to these men because they believe it will somehow benefit them, personally. In all cases, though, it is the Truth (here's your "objective Universe") that the wielders of that immense power do not themselves personally own the power they wield. In some cases these power-brokers would prefer to believe otherwise, and in many cases they would prefer tthat their victims believe otherwise, but.... well, there is this "Universal Law" thing...
If, on the other hand, broad means interpreting the fact that CNN doesn't say something as evidence that something exists then I will, in fact, pass.
Everything CNN says is a lie. Start with that. I'm guessing you'll take a pass, rather than accept the obvious corrollary of: What you don't see on CNN is Truth. Of course you can't accept that. Who could? It's far easier to accept what they tell you, despite the fact that you _know_ they are mouthpieces for politicians... that same group that you can always tell when they're lying because their lips are moving. If you want to argue that CNN, FoxNews, et al are somehow _not_ mouthpieces for politicians, your arguments will not find an audience with me. I'm too old and tired for th
Likewise, if you start from the supposition that there is no conspiracy, then you will find ample evidence that there is not. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, freind, I was just sympathizing with the fact that you apprently got rooked into fighting in a war.
While I sympathize with your demands for rigour, I do not sympathize with your implication that anything that doesn't toe the party line is de facto "conspiracy theory", and in need of some rigourous proof as defined by yourself.
you reject substantial evidence of other causes (such a widely reported genocide), and evidence contrary to your theory (like the self-destructive effects to Clinton) in preference of the sort of nebulous evidence you cite.
I will point out that I did not advance a theory, nor did I cite evidence, nebulous or otherwise.
However, since you have now driven me to examine my opinions, I will add that I believe this opinion of mine expresses a rather broader view of world events than you seem to find satisfying. I would encourage you to quit staring at the leaves on the trees and realize that there are mountains on one side of the forest, and an ocean on the other, so to speak...
I don't dismiss your claims out of hand. But I can only take them as seriously as you do. And frankly, it sounds like you aren't doing anything more serious than regurgitating what you heard hanging around your local college campus.
Well, that's all just kinda sad... well, except for the fact that I guess what I'm really getting out of this is that you are telling me that the present day campus radicals are saying the same types of things I am about Bosnia and the oil interests? Well bully for them, I say. I wish them better luck than we had back in my day.
Bottom line is, while I believe my statements (I will decline to call them "arguments", thank-you -- I'm not trying to prove anything) are well-reasoned, I'm not going to provide the references you're asking for. I don't have them at my fingertips, and I figure when you really want to see them, you'll find them without my help.
Sorry, I thought you said you served in the Balkans. It sounds almost as though you are saying you don't know why you were there.
Are you saying that Clinton comitted us to the Balkans (A.K.A "Bosnia") to make Bush and Cheney rich?
Not exactly. I was saying that US troops were committed to the Balkan's to protect the interests of Big Oil. Close, but I did not specify that Clinton (a Democrat) was actually was performing a task in support of the Bush Dynasty (Republicans). While there are certain arguments going around to that effect, it was not to my point. My point was more to...
On oil? There's oil in the Balkans? WTF are you talking about?
I believe what was at issue was actually an oil pipeline, something about Russia, Afghanistan, and oil pipelines. I'll look it up, if you insist, but you should be able to find it fairly easily if you apply yourself using Google. This is not new information, nor is it news. I am certainly not enough of an expert to detail it for you.
I would stand by my assertion that Big Oil -- as represented by Bush/Cheney, and others -- did in fact make large money off US military activities in the Balkans. It's not really so complicated as all that...
Of course, if you start following the whole conflict -- go back before Bush I -- down to the present, very obvious, action in Iraq, I guess it could be confusing until you start colating the information instead of just slurping up what CNN and FoxNews are telling you....
[the US law defining strong encryption as a "munition"]
The law in question here predates this administration. I believe that it was enacted under President Clinton
Actually, I believe the law in question predates both Clinton, as well. I seem to recall discussion of that law under Bush I and/or Reagan. Could someone confirm or deny the date that law was enacted?
I personally "exported democracy" to the Balkans under the previous administration, to my personal loss.
You can bet the oil companies made a profit on it -- that would be Bush/Cheney, in case you didin't realize. Nothing cheap about that shot...
Speak for yourself, you Tool of the System, you Corporatist Mouthpiece. Most Linux users are just normal people! Ordinary folk who are sick of being characterized as weirdos by you wannabe posuers who think using Linux is somehow "cooler" than using some other less reliable, more expensive solution.
You want the FreeBSD chat room, I believe....
Re:"hazards and risks are poorly understood"
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 1
a thousand lumps of metal. If you form them into cubes and throw them on the ground, they can be walked over relatively easily. If you form them into balls, it may be difficult to walk over them without stumbling. If you form them into caltrops, walking on them will cause injury. These properties are all independent of the raw effect of the metal itself.
... in other words, the first commercially available nano-machine is the...
New and Improved! Bass-O-Matic(tm)... now using BuckyBall techonolgy!
Re:"hazards and risks are poorly understood"
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 1
You mean, buckyballs destroy fat? Soon we will see the Weight Watchers buckyball pills!:-)
Screw that, they destroy lipids in the brain. I think that means we can smoke them.
Obviously it DOES matter who you vote for, even in a system as corrupt as ours.
You make a good argument, but it is all based on a flawed assumption: that your vote actually counts. If the system is as corrupt as some believe, then the elections are just a staged play, and the vote you cast, while it may be counted, does not actually play a direct part in selecting who takes office. In fact, it probably just gets your name added to a list labelled Potential Trouble-maker
If the market is willing to pay what the seller's asking, then that's the price. That's how markets work. If you don't like the pricing, don't buy.
Heheh. Well, that is and interesting point.
It seems that more and more, lately, consumers are not willing to pay the inflated prices demanded by the non-artists at RIAA/MPAA. And RIAA/MPAA is pissed about it.
Of course, many people are willing to pay the much smaller cost associated with acquiring a shared version of the material (note that even files acquired thru P2P sharing are not free -- there are hardware and bandwidth costs). The message seems to be that the material distributed by RIAA/MPAA is not worth what they have been charging for it. Unfortunately, RIAA/MPAA prefers to believe that the message is actually the vast majority of people who listen-to/watch our products are theives enabled by technology.
Imo, the fact that RIAA/MPAA continiues to assert the intrinsinc worth of a product that many of us knew was crap decades before there was such a thing P2P file sharing (and which some of us have consistently declined to purchase over those decades) -- the fact that RIAA/MPAA asserts that their product has a given value does not make that product worth what they claim it is worth. Period. The market is proving that point. P2P file sharing is just proving that point. RIAA/MPAA continue to whine about it long and loud, but they can't change what is no obvious to everyone; that no one is really willing to pay their set rates for their product.
OTOH, there is still a discussion to be had about copyright and how it pertains to the Artists' right to make a living. Of course, that is another discussion the RIAA/MPAA is desperate to keep out of the public eye. Evidence their pro-active legal stance against consumers, rather than in favour of artists. Note that the membership of e.g. Recording Industry Artists Association (RIAA) is glaringly short of actual recording artists, consisting instead of publishers, legalists, and mobsters... Racketeering parasites on the backs of artists and performers, in short.
Fwiw, the story said there was no word of conversation conversation on the connection, it didn't say the call contained silence. It could have been a data call and the story would still be right.... from the story:
... cellphone call that lasted less than a minute and involved not a single word of conversation.
...PATRIOT and the other crap pushed on us by the paniced public [...] saying the Navy shot down that plane is just ignorant.
No more ignorant than thinking the patriot act was "pushed... by the paniced [sic] public". The so-called patriot act is not supported by any US citizen I know of...
Just because those the apes in the White House propose something, or those bozos in Congress vote it, that doesn't mean it's either a) Constinutional, or b) an accurate representation of the citizens' desires. To believe either is universally the case is just plain naive.
Declare a State of War, or admit that every action taken in the so-called 'War On Terror' is illegal under US law, and that the totalitarian regime currently running the country is just a bunch of power mad thugs, are not Americans in the true sense of the word, and that American citizens will have to remove them to regain control of the country their anscestors fought, bled, and died for.
Kicking around a bunch of dirtbag Iraqis might be fun and profitable, but it's kiddie playground politics compared to the Defense of Liberty.
Wait, which came first,/. or FoxNews ? Wasn't FoxNews just a reaction to/.'s liberal bias? I always thought when the talked about "the liberal media" they meant "/."
> I've been reading./ for years now, and I always thought that it was a BBS that > was extremely popular because it linked to lots of news stories, which gave its > members a constant stream of new topics to "discuss". > > Slashdot is what happens after journalism.
Interesting point. But wouldn't it be more of a "meta-journalism", since many of the readers are journaling infomation about the news?
In any case, I would hate to have to admit that only those "pros" who work for the major media outlets can practice "journalism". That would be a Bad Thing, since most of them don't practice journalism at all; they are simply actors mouthing bad lines, written by some 3rd-rate spin doctor somewhere. In fact, most of the Fox personnel ("writers" and mouthpeices alike) don't appear to have a strong enough command of English grammer even to begin practicing anything that resembles Jounalism as it was originally known. Perhaps they are fluent in some other languages or dialects (doublespeak? newspeak? gibberish?), but English that's not. Where do they get those idiots, from the American public school system?
If journalism involves the recording and presentation of facts and information concerning events (news), then yes, I would have to say that/. is journalism, and even a cut above the state of the video media. Definitely. I can find more interesting and useful information in reading/. user comments for five minutes than I can get from hours (sometimes days) devoted to the info-tainment and incoherent editorial piffle offered by the cable networks...
"Slashdot: A state of chaotic, post-journalistic media nightmare, driven by suppressed rage against the mass betrayal of journalistic integrity committed by those we once trusted to preserve and record the common points of our individual perspectives on Reality."
> Another clue is the fact that he set the domain > name up as his own property so the town would be > unable to switch to another server [...]
If so, he's not the first to have thought of it, nor the biggest offender. He could have modelled the scam on the activities engaged in by Knight-Ridder thru their subsidaries, RealCities, some years ago, since what he did would be (assuming for a moment that he did it as a scam) precisely the same as RealCities' "marketing" scheme.
They gave away free domain name registrations for area businesses through-out the SouthEast, but retained ownership of the domain names they registered. They also offered free hosting services for awhile, then after a year or so, pleading "financial hardship" as an excuse, started billing for both hosting (approx $35/mo) and web site maintenance ($85/hr). No option to xfer hosting or maintenance was made, and in fact, it was not possible, since the subsidaries retained the authentication access to the hosting accounts. I.e. in order to post changes to a site, material had to be submitted, and the maintainers fees assessed.
In my estimations, their scam was good for several millions per year minimum thru their subsidary corps Real*.com (RealRaleigh.com, RealValdosta.com, RealColumbus.com, RealMacon.com, RealTalahassee.com, etc, etc), and afaik it's still going on.
Found out about this when a client decided to start doing their own hosting and maintenance, but didn't understand why the couldn't move the DNS pointers to their new servers. It turned out Knight-Ridder had retained ownership of the domain, but continued to insist to the client "It's yours" when the client presented them with the DNS records....
Anyone know how to query whois for a list of all the domains owned by Knight-Ridder.com? It would probably be good for a class action....
Fwiw, the client protested against Knight-Ridder continuing to do business under the client's corporate identity (the domain name), and Knight-Ridder finally caved with extremely bad grace (threats, demands for money, and question about "where are you getting this information [the DNS records]"). KR managed to seize the domain name again, about a year later, apparently by including it in a batch job of registrar changes run at register.com; register.com was not the registrar for this domain, though, and was very cooperative in restoring the correct ownership.
As far as I know, this is the only case of any of KR's victims recouping their domain...
All this to say: If this guy is guilty of 4 felony counts for doing the same thing KR did, then perhaps someone should sub-peona the DNS records for KR. They are a helluva lot guiltier than he is, having done this thousands of times in several states, as opposed to once in a county jurisdiction.
It'll be intersting to see how it works out.
And for those who aren't aware of it: Knight-Ridder Corp of San Jose, CA owns the vast majority of all "secondary city" print media outlets (newspapers) in the United States, and several major city newspapers (ref: they were bidding to acquire a Minnapolis/St Paul paper, in early 2003).
...PATRIOT and the other crap pushed on us by the paniced public [...] saying the Navy shot down that plane is just ignorant.
No more ignorant than thinking the patriot act was "pushed... by the paniced [sic] public". The so-called patriot act is not supported by any US citizen I know of...
Just because those the apes in the White House propose something, or those bozos in Congress vote it, that doesn't it's either a) Constinutional, or b) an acurate representation of the citizens desires. To believe either is universally the case is just plain naive.
Declare a State of War, or admit that every action taken in the so-called 'War On Teror is illegal under US law, and that the totalitarian regime currently running the country is just a bunch of power mad thugs, are not Americans in the true sense of the word, and that American citizens will have to remove them to regain control of the country their anscestors fought, bled, and died for.
Kicking around a bunch of dirtbag Iraqis might be fun and profitable, but it's kiddie playground politics compared to the Defense of Liberty.
Uh-huh. And I guess the IE being based on the XMosaic codebase is rumour, too, then, eh? Or did you think M$ actually had a browser technology before they started copying code...
The Reuter's article on Yahoo contains a number of inaccuracies that are clearly prejudicial, and are probably sourced within Microsoft.
It (the story) amounts to an obvious attempt to spin up a scenario that will lead ultimately to criminal prosectution of persons involved in Open Source. And the story being such an obvious attempt at spin doctoring could lead one to believe there is more going on here than one poorly written news story...
Apparently Gates & Co. have decided their civil case fronted by SCO is not quite strong enough, and are trying to establish criminal precedent in order that, whether the current SCO effort succeeds or fails, the next case will be criminal.
One could hope that the courts will develop enough tech skillz to determine that the line
for (int i=0; i < cnt; i++) {
showing up in both windoze and Linux code does not constitute proof of theft under some Gatesien system of jurisprudence...
Examples of the (imo) prejudicial language in the story [emphasis mine]:
...copies of the source code [...] were being traded over the internet
There is no evidence cited that the code is being "traded". It appears that it is being distributed, but I haven't seen any reports of it being exchanged for anything else. This is key, since the languaged used here implies a profit motive on the part of the alleged "traders"; necesary for the criminal prosectution because there is a need to establish that the code is worth a great deal...
Source code is the... lifeblood of any software company
This sounds like it came straight out of a Microsoft publicist. It is an emotional appeal statement, designed to imply a henious threat to the alleged victim, Microsoft (and by implication, SCO).
The statement is factually inaccurate, even as metaphore. Source code is a principle part of the products manufactured by most software companies, but expertise in the creation of source code is more properly the "lifeblood" of the company.
Of course, Microsoft is a bit challenged in the expertise dept, but that should be applied to "any software company"....
Microsoft has [...] shared its source code with close partners and carefully chosen organizations, with legal agreements that threaten litigation in the event of that any of is leaked.
...followed by...
"It's illegal for third parties to post Microsoft source code [...]"
If it is indeed "illegal" for 3rd parties to post the sources, then why would the aforementioned "agreements" require threat of civil action? If it's illegal, there should be no need to lititgate. The threats would be of prosecution, not litigation.
Furthermore, the word "share" here is ridiculous. If you've ever looked at what it takes to get an NDA to look at M$ sources, there's no "sharing" to it. It's a business transaction, and it doesn't happen unless M$ gets the lions "share" of any potential benefit.
Software companies that create programs running on Windows need access to source code to build their own products.
WTF? Well, admittedly I haven't written any "programs running on Windows" in quite a few years, but I no idea things had changed quite that much... [that's sarcasm in case you can't tell; the statement is just plain wrong]
Microsoft said that it was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and legal authorities to try and track the origin
there is and remains a strong privacy constituency with memebers from across the political spectrum in the United States
Interestingly, this constituency you refer to appears to be the same constituency that has consistently and whole-heartedly espoused (at least until very recently) the belief that the US can never be totalitarian simply because the US has fought totalitarian societies in the past.
I consider it unfortunate that the US population has trotted so far down the path taken by totalitarian nations in the past that is become a virtual certainty that the US will be recognized as a totalitarian nation within the next couple decades.
The US population simply sees no reason to guard itself agaist totalitarian mores and, ultimately, totalitarian leaders, since totalitarians are the Bad Guys, and the US -- by its own definition is not Bad.
The US move to becoming an unabashedly totalitarian society is well advanced. The scramble to recoup lost freedoms has begun, but it is too late. By November 2004 DC will be in such chaos over some "terrorist activity" or another (ricin, anthrax, suitcase nukes, rabid monkeys, whatever) the elections will have to be postponed. At which point... well, you figure it out.
The US becomes a totalitarian state because it's population has been trained (brainwashed is not to strong a word, imo) to believe the it can't possibly happen, so they see no need to guard against it. It will take a 21st Century Stalin or Hitler to finally degrade the quality of Freedom enough that the good Citizens will realize where the totalitatians went when the US kicked their asses on every other continent on the planet...
Well, this all comes as a real shocker, to me. It was my understanding (based on a conversation about a decade ago) that Micro$oft owns SCO outright.
The exact quote (iirc) from the 2nd-hand conversation circa 1993 was something like "...well, doesn't Microsoft still own SCO Unix, anyway?" -- the context was something around Xenix(tm) -- anybody remember where that came from? It was an SCO-derivative, wasn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Is that an either/or question? You seem to be implying that somehow the things that "spring fully formed" to my mind as I post are somehow unrelated to the "objective Universe" ... a stance I find perjorative at best.
If you're trying to ask where I got the idea, I have to say, I don't really remember. It was some years ago that I was acquainted with someone who presented me with some information that convinced me that it was a more realistic than I had otherwise heard. I haven't seen anything between now and then that convinced me otherwise, so it is my operative assumption that it is true.
Okay, well, you probably need to understand that I am not interested in politicians motives. I believe I fully understand what motivates them, and I further believe that what motivates them is not something that I care to see propagated in the world. In a word, it's Nasty, and should be removed from this so-called "objective Universe" you seem to believe in.
Since I believe I understand the movtivation, I also believe I understand the goal, and since I don't much care for that, either, I choose to pursue a study of what, exactly, allows their behaviour to continue down a path that no truly sane person can believe is beneficial to any group of persons except the politicians themselves.
A simplistic way of saying it might be to say that, if the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and that's just the way it is, I want to know Why. You are trying to draw me into a discussion of the How, and that is not of as much interest to me. I do not believe the motives of the politicians individually provides the mechanism or an explanation. I believe it to be a societal problem, whose answer lies in the "why" of societal dynamics.
As to breadth of scope: You seem to be focussed on individuals -- Bush, Clinton, etc -- I am much more interested in the forces they represent. They are, after all, just individual men. Rich, true, and wielding a great deal of power, but they do not own that power. They are simply using it to serve their own ends.
It is of interest to me to know what causes masses of people to yeild up their power to such men. In some cases it is simple threat. In other cases the owners of the power have been convinced of some thing or things that are patently not true. In other cases people lend their power to these men because they believe it will somehow benefit them, personally. In all cases, though, it is the Truth (here's your "objective Universe") that the wielders of that immense power do not themselves personally own the power they wield. In some cases these power-brokers would prefer to believe otherwise, and in many cases they would prefer tthat their victims believe otherwise, but .... well, there is this "Universal Law" thing ...
Everything CNN says is a lie. Start with that. I'm guessing you'll take a pass, rather than accept the obvious corrollary of: What you don't see on CNN is Truth. Of course you can't accept that. Who could? It's far easier to accept what they tell you, despite the fact that you _know_ they are mouthpieces for politicians ... that same group that you can always tell when they're lying because their lips are moving. If you want to argue that CNN, FoxNews, et al are somehow _not_ mouthpieces for politicians, your arguments will not find an audience with me. I'm too old and tired for th
Likewise, if you start from the supposition that there is no conspiracy, then you will find ample evidence that there is not. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, freind, I was just sympathizing with the fact that you apprently got rooked into fighting in a war.
While I sympathize with your demands for rigour, I do not sympathize with your implication that anything that doesn't toe the party line is de facto "conspiracy theory", and in need of some rigourous proof as defined by yourself.
I will point out that I did not advance a theory, nor did I cite evidence, nebulous or otherwise.
However, since you have now driven me to examine my opinions, I will add that I believe this opinion of mine expresses a rather broader view of world events than you seem to find satisfying. I would encourage you to quit staring at the leaves on the trees and realize that there are mountains on one side of the forest, and an ocean on the other, so to speak...
Well, that's all just kinda sad ... well, except for the fact that I guess what I'm really getting out of this is that you are telling me that the present day campus radicals are saying the same types of things I am about Bosnia and the oil interests? Well bully for them, I say. I wish them better luck than we had back in my day.
Bottom line is, while I believe my statements (I will decline to call them "arguments", thank-you -- I'm not trying to prove anything) are well-reasoned, I'm not going to provide the references you're asking for. I don't have them at my fingertips, and I figure when you really want to see them, you'll find them without my help.
I would mod that up if I could...
Sorry, I thought you said you served in the Balkans. It sounds almost as though you are saying you don't know why you were there.
Not exactly. I was saying that US troops were committed to the Balkan's to protect the interests of Big Oil. Close, but I did not specify that Clinton (a Democrat) was actually was performing a task in support of the Bush Dynasty (Republicans). While there are certain arguments going around to that effect, it was not to my point. My point was more to...
I believe what was at issue was actually an oil pipeline, something about Russia, Afghanistan, and oil pipelines. I'll look it up, if you insist, but you should be able to find it fairly easily if you apply yourself using Google. This is not new information, nor is it news. I am certainly not enough of an expert to detail it for you.
I would stand by my assertion that Big Oil -- as represented by Bush/Cheney, and others -- did in fact make large money off US military activities in the Balkans. It's not really so complicated as all that...
Of course, if you start following the whole conflict -- go back before Bush I -- down to the present, very obvious, action in Iraq, I guess it could be confusing until you start colating the information instead of just slurping up what CNN and FoxNews are telling you....
Emacs is God, you vi thugz...
The number of the beast: vi vi vi
Actually, I believe the law in question predates both Clinton, as well. I seem to recall discussion of that law under Bush I and/or Reagan. Could someone confirm or deny the date that law was enacted?
You can bet the oil companies made a profit on it -- that would be Bush/Cheney, in case you didin't realize. Nothing cheap about that shot...
Speak for yourself, you Tool of the System, you Corporatist Mouthpiece. Most Linux users are just normal people! Ordinary folk who are sick of being characterized as weirdos by you wannabe posuers who think using Linux is somehow "cooler" than using some other less reliable, more expensive solution.
You want the FreeBSD chat room, I believe....
... in other words, the first commercially available nano-machine is the...
New and Improved! Bass-O-Matic(tm) ... now using BuckyBall techonolgy!
Screw that, they destroy lipids in the brain. I think that means we can smoke them.
You make a good argument, but it is all based on a flawed assumption: that your vote actually counts. If the system is as corrupt as some believe, then the elections are just a staged play, and the vote you cast, while it may be counted, does not actually play a direct part in selecting who takes office. In fact, it probably just gets your name added to a list labelled Potential Trouble-maker
Heheh. Well, that is and interesting point.
It seems that more and more, lately, consumers are not willing to pay the inflated prices demanded by the non-artists at RIAA/MPAA. And RIAA/MPAA is pissed about it.
Of course, many people are willing to pay the much smaller cost associated with acquiring a shared version of the material (note that even files acquired thru P2P sharing are not free -- there are hardware and bandwidth costs). The message seems to be that the material distributed by RIAA/MPAA is not worth what they have been charging for it. Unfortunately, RIAA/MPAA prefers to believe that the message is actually the vast majority of people who listen-to/watch our products are theives enabled by technology.
Imo, the fact that RIAA/MPAA continiues to assert the intrinsinc worth of a product that many of us knew was crap decades before there was such a thing P2P file sharing (and which some of us have consistently declined to purchase over those decades) -- the fact that RIAA/MPAA asserts that their product has a given value does not make that product worth what they claim it is worth. Period. The market is proving that point. P2P file sharing is just proving that point. RIAA/MPAA continue to whine about it long and loud, but they can't change what is no obvious to everyone; that no one is really willing to pay their set rates for their product.
OTOH, there is still a discussion to be had about copyright and how it pertains to the Artists' right to make a living. Of course, that is another discussion the RIAA/MPAA is desperate to keep out of the public eye. Evidence their pro-active legal stance against consumers, rather than in favour of artists. Note that the membership of e.g. Recording Industry Artists Association (RIAA) is glaringly short of actual recording artists, consisting instead of publishers, legalists, and mobsters... Racketeering parasites on the backs of artists and performers, in short.
No more ignorant than thinking the patriot act was "pushed
Just because those the apes in the White House propose something, or those bozos in Congress vote it, that doesn't mean it's either a) Constinutional, or b) an accurate representation of the citizens' desires. To believe either is universally the case is just plain naive.
Declare a State of War, or admit that every action taken in the so-called 'War On Terror' is illegal under US law, and that the totalitarian regime currently running the country is just a bunch of power mad thugs, are not Americans in the true sense of the word, and that American citizens will have to remove them to regain control of the country their anscestors fought, bled, and died for.
Kicking around a bunch of dirtbag Iraqis might be fun and profitable, but it's kiddie playground politics compared to the Defense of Liberty.
Wait, which came first, /. or FoxNews ? Wasn't FoxNews just a reaction to /.'s liberal bias? I always thought when the talked about "the liberal media" they meant "/."
> he didn't say 'not exercise'... fox is far closer to neutral than cnn, and
..... okay, that's the best laf I've had all day; thanks AC. ///
> especially slashdot.
RotFLMAO
> I generally tend to ignore American media.
... and if accuracy is not exactly fairness or balance, it's still important ....
Fox is not American. They were Aussie-owned, last I checked...
Just wanted to remind everyone of that, in the interest of accuracy
> Slashdot is providing is readers with valuable lessons in critical thinking
Oh sh*t. Are they thinking of starting to charge for those lessons? Has the sheriff heard about this?
> I've been reading ./ for years now, and I always thought that it was a BBS that
/. is journalism, and even a cut above the state of the video media. Definitely. I can find more interesting and useful information in reading /. user comments for five minutes than I can get from hours (sometimes days) devoted to the info-tainment and incoherent editorial piffle offered by the cable networks...
> was extremely popular because it linked to lots of news stories, which gave its
> members a constant stream of new topics to "discuss".
>
> Slashdot is what happens after journalism.
Interesting point. But wouldn't it be more of a "meta-journalism", since many of the readers are journaling infomation about the news?
In any case, I would hate to have to admit that only those "pros" who work for the major media outlets can practice "journalism". That would be a Bad Thing, since most of them don't practice journalism at all; they are simply actors mouthing bad lines, written by some 3rd-rate spin doctor somewhere. In fact, most of the Fox personnel ("writers" and mouthpeices alike) don't appear to have a strong enough command of English grammer even to begin practicing anything that resembles Jounalism as it was originally known. Perhaps they are fluent in some other languages or dialects (doublespeak? newspeak? gibberish?), but English that's not. Where do they get those idiots, from the American public school system?
If journalism involves the recording and presentation of facts and information concerning events (news), then yes, I would have to say that
"Slashdot: A state of chaotic, post-journalistic media nightmare, driven by suppressed rage against the mass betrayal of journalistic integrity committed by those we once trusted to preserve and record the common points of our individual perspectives on Reality."
> Another clue is the fact that he set the domain
...
....
...
> name up as his own property so the town would be
> unable to switch to another server [...]
If so, he's not the first to have thought of it, nor the biggest offender. He could have modelled the scam on the activities engaged in by Knight-Ridder thru their subsidaries, RealCities, some years ago, since what he did would be (assuming for a moment that he did it as a scam) precisely the same as RealCities' "marketing" scheme.
They gave away free domain name registrations for area businesses through-out the SouthEast, but retained ownership of the domain names they registered. They also offered free hosting services for awhile, then after a year or so, pleading "financial hardship" as an excuse, started billing for both hosting (approx $35/mo) and web site maintenance ($85/hr). No option to xfer hosting or maintenance was made, and in fact, it was not possible, since the subsidaries retained the authentication access to the hosting accounts. I.e. in order to post changes to a site, material had to be submitted, and the maintainers fees assessed.
In my estimations, their scam was good for several millions per year minimum thru their subsidary corps Real*.com (RealRaleigh.com, RealValdosta.com, RealColumbus.com, RealMacon.com, RealTalahassee.com, etc, etc), and afaik it's still going on.
Found out about this when a client decided to start doing their own hosting and maintenance, but didn't understand why the couldn't move the DNS pointers to their new servers. It turned out Knight-Ridder had retained ownership of the domain, but continued to insist to the client "It's yours" when the client presented them with the DNS records.
Anyone know how to query whois for a list of all the domains owned by Knight-Ridder.com? It would probably be good for a class action
Fwiw, the client protested against Knight-Ridder continuing to do business under the client's corporate identity (the domain name), and Knight-Ridder finally caved with extremely bad grace (threats, demands for money, and question about "where are you getting this information [the DNS records]"). KR managed to seize the domain name again, about a year later, apparently by including it in a batch job of registrar changes run at register.com; register.com was not the registrar for this domain, though, and was very cooperative in restoring the correct ownership.
As far as I know, this is the only case of any of KR's victims recouping their domain
All this to say: If this guy is guilty of 4 felony counts for doing the same thing KR did, then perhaps someone should sub-peona the DNS records for KR. They are a helluva lot guiltier than he is, having done this thousands of times in several states, as opposed to once in a county jurisdiction.
It'll be intersting to see how it works out.
And for those who aren't aware of it: Knight-Ridder Corp of San Jose, CA owns the vast majority of all "secondary city" print media outlets (newspapers) in the United States, and several major city newspapers (ref: they were bidding to acquire a Minnapolis/St Paul paper, in early 2003).
No more ignorant than thinking the patriot act was "pushed
Just because those the apes in the White House propose something, or those bozos in Congress vote it, that doesn't it's either a) Constinutional, or b) an acurate representation of the citizens desires. To believe either is universally the case is just plain naive.
Declare a State of War, or admit that every action taken in the so-called 'War On Teror is illegal under US law, and that the totalitarian regime currently running the country is just a bunch of power mad thugs, are not Americans in the true sense of the word, and that American citizens will have to remove them to regain control of the country their anscestors fought, bled, and died for.
Kicking around a bunch of dirtbag Iraqis might be fun and profitable, but it's kiddie playground politics compared to the Defense of Liberty.
Uh-huh. And I guess the IE being based on the XMosaic codebase is rumour, too, then, eh? Or did you think M$ actually had a browser technology before they started copying code...
The Reuter's article on Yahoo contains a number of inaccuracies that are clearly prejudicial, and are probably sourced within Microsoft.
It (the story) amounts to an obvious attempt to spin up a scenario that will lead ultimately to criminal prosectution of persons involved in Open Source. And the story being such an obvious attempt at spin doctoring could lead one to believe there is more going on here than one poorly written news story...
Apparently Gates & Co. have decided their civil case fronted by SCO is not quite strong enough, and are trying to establish criminal precedent in order that, whether the current SCO effort succeeds or fails, the next case will be criminal.
One could hope that the courts will develop enough tech skillz to determine that the line
showing up in both windoze and Linux code does not constitute proof of theft under some Gatesien system of jurisprudence ...
Examples of the (imo) prejudicial language in the story [emphasis mine]:
There is no evidence cited that the code is being "traded". It appears that it is being distributed, but I haven't seen any reports of it being exchanged for anything else. This is key, since the languaged used here implies a profit motive on the part of the alleged "traders"; necesary for the criminal prosectution because there is a need to establish that the code is worth a great deal...
This sounds like it came straight out of a Microsoft publicist. It is an emotional appeal statement, designed to imply a henious threat to the alleged victim, Microsoft (and by implication, SCO).
The statement is factually inaccurate, even as metaphore. Source code is a principle part of the products manufactured by most software companies, but expertise in the creation of source code is more properly the "lifeblood" of the company.
Of course, Microsoft is a bit challenged in the expertise dept, but that should be applied to "any software company"....
If it is indeed "illegal" for 3rd parties to post the sources, then why would the aforementioned "agreements" require threat of civil action? If it's illegal, there should be no need to lititgate. The threats would be of prosecution, not litigation.
Furthermore, the word "share" here is ridiculous. If you've ever looked at what it takes to get an NDA to look at M$ sources, there's no "sharing" to it. It's a business transaction, and it doesn't happen unless M$ gets the lions "share" of any potential benefit.
WTF? Well, admittedly I haven't written any "programs running on Windows" in quite a few years, but I no idea things had changed quite that much... [that's sarcasm in case you can't tell; the statement is just plain wrong]
there is and remains a strong privacy constituency with memebers from across the political spectrum in the United States
Interestingly, this constituency you refer to appears to be the same constituency that has consistently and whole-heartedly espoused (at least until very recently) the belief that the US can never be totalitarian simply because the US has fought totalitarian societies in the past.
I consider it unfortunate that the US population has trotted so far down the path taken by totalitarian nations in the past that is become a virtual certainty that the US will be recognized as a totalitarian nation within the next couple decades.
The US population simply sees no reason to guard itself agaist totalitarian mores and, ultimately, totalitarian leaders, since totalitarians are the Bad Guys, and the US -- by its own definition is not Bad.
The US move to becoming an unabashedly totalitarian society is well advanced. The scramble to recoup lost freedoms has begun, but it is too late. By November 2004 DC will be in such chaos over some "terrorist activity" or another (ricin, anthrax, suitcase nukes, rabid monkeys, whatever) the elections will have to be postponed. At which point ... well, you figure it out.
The US becomes a totalitarian state because it's population has been trained (brainwashed is not to strong a word, imo) to believe the it can't possibly happen, so they see no need to guard against it. It will take a 21st Century Stalin or Hitler to finally degrade the quality of Freedom enough that the good Citizens will realize where the totalitatians went when the US kicked their asses on every other continent on the planet...
> We elected this government?
Well, this all comes as a real shocker, to me. It was my understanding (based on a conversation about a decade ago) that Micro$oft owns SCO outright.
The exact quote (iirc) from the 2nd-hand conversation circa 1993 was something like "...well, doesn't Microsoft still own SCO Unix, anyway?" -- the context was something around Xenix(tm) -- anybody remember where that came from? It was an SCO-derivative, wasn't it?