I would agree with you on Hitler being "as 'clear' as a mudpuddle". I would even go so far as to say that the things LRH was describing are fairly old, and if you believe his writings, then you would believe the things he described were very old. But since LRH is the founder of the Church of Scientology, and did that, IIRC in the 1960's (but certainly after WWII), I am afraid I am going to have to ask you for some additional evidence to support your claims.
It's hard to prove the truth of spiritual matters in a scientific way. But it is another matter to produce evidence of human beings performing scientific experiments with historical figures (which is essentially what you are describing).
As a seller on eBay for more than 5 years, now with more than 1500 feedback comments (99.2% positive), I have felt every negative for WEEKS! after I have gotten them; getting emails about what went wrong, etc etc. I also KNOW LOTS of eBayers will peruse through feedback, even with my high rating and look for my one or two negatives. Where this really comes into play is if the buyer is a problematic or habitual complainer, they will use your previous negatives as ammo against you to say, "See, you have a past of poor service" (Not that I experience that many problems) Just, it seems the last two negatives I have gotten as an excuse to justify the poster's poor communication skills.
One of the problems here is that many sellers inflate their scores by buying from themselves and leaving positive feedback. On lots of them it is obvious because the positive feedback looks all the same and the negative contradicts it. I have to admit in the past I have specifically looked up negative feedback, partly for this reason, and partly because I am interested in knowing how a given person handles problems. Does s/he ignore all complaints and cry "caveat emptor?" Or does s/he try to fix the problem if s/he possibly can?
This philosophy applies to everyone I do business with in any context. I also tend not to buy without guarantees. So far I have had better luck with ebay than with major stores due to my caution.
And to anyone who thinks that eBay should have been held responsible, I would ask this...should Slashdot now be held responsible for what I am saying in this post?
Microsoft and the Church of Scientology seem to think so. I think it is funny that whereas/. never removed comments before, even those which broke MS agreements, they removed a comment containing what they say is copyrighted material but which is freely available by order of the courts (google for Fishman Affidavit).
The Church of Scientology! 10x as scarier than microsoft and 100x stupider!
I do not think MS' claim would stand up in court, and they have not been willing to try... yet. People are probably ignoring them. But as I understand it, they have a different license for imaging. OEMs for instance consistently image systems they are selling, though the image is approved by Microsoft and puts one in a state such that the license key still has to be entered usually.
I however no longer license Microsoft products, and avoid them even at work. I also take pains not to be responsible for the Microsoft licensing decisions at my current employer. Essentially over the last few years their claims have become increasingly more ludicrous. They have retroactively invalidated Win9x licenses and those for previous Office products, created a new license for XP and newer such that the forced upgrades/annual fees to microsoft are now formalized, and essentially made a serious nuisance of themselves, besides their constant terroristic threats (ever receive one of their audit letters?).
Businesses which continue to rely on Microsoft products have continued to squeak by because at the end of the day unless they are actually forced to undergo the expensive audit process they can essentially ignore a lot of Microsoft's licensing schemes with relative impunity or greatly diminished effect. Besides, legacy technology has them somewhat locked in. I personally think this is a bad model for business and anyone relying on Microsoft for their business is effectively negligent, but that is my opinion.
You have an excellent point most slashbots will have ignored. However, what about the continued dogged pursuit of abandonware sites? Microsoft will not let anyone offer Windows 1.0 or DOS for free (they even have historically attacked people for providing boot floppies). It costs them money to pursue these sites, with lawyers sending letters and surfing for them, etc.
I don't expect them to try to manage an open source dos project, or even release it into the wild. But they clearly see value in spending money chasing people who give away ancient windows versions (and even reselling current ones).
If microsoft controls the hardware, you can bet your booties it will not work with anything but Windows. It may not have to have overt features stopping alternatives (like an encrypted boot process ala PS2 and Xbox) but it won't matter since driver developers will not be given any information to go on, and reverse engineering will be treated as illegal.
Nope. I bet counsumers will eat this up if it meets the users wants and has a low price point. You and I may not like it, but we don't control the end user market.
Or the corporate market. Who else read that bit about a built-in phone that connects automagically to applications storing information about the caller and brings said apps to the fore immediately after answering the call automatically and thought "Call center managers will eat this up!"
Having tried to install OpenBSD on a Quadra 800 using an external hard drive for swap and wasting hours and hours of time in the attempt, and having successfully installed Windows 98 in a couple hours, I won't take this challenge.
You installed Win98 on a Quadra? Cool! Perhaps you should post a Slashdot article on how you did it; a fine change from the versions of "Linux on a wristwatch" articles.
On a more serious note, I never had a problem getting OpenBSD to work (and IIRC I first instaled it on a Quadra), though I did notice the installer takes some serious getting used to if you aren't used to the bsd way to do things. What are you running on your Quadra now?
Yes, and you will be running a platform with known security vulnerabilities Microsoft will not fix, with no new patches available. Also, ask someone who has actually had the pain of admining an NT4 Exchange Server about uptimes, and why their company bothers paying the $$$ for Win2k and new versions of Exchange, neither of which will run on a p-166. Besides you would have an interesting time running even NT4 and Exchange 5 or something on a p-166, whereas your favorite Linux distro with qmail or sendmail is another matter altogether.
Yeah, I guess if you want anything on windows you have to buy it, NOT. Ever heard of freeware?
On windows this amounts to games and a few odd utilities. Most are not really freeware, but shareware/nagware/spyware/whatever. NONE perform the functions described above.
Windows defragmentation toll was written by a good christian company and banned by Nazi germany.
DisKeeper was created by Executive Software, who are a Scientologist company. The Nazi Germany predates Scientology. It was the clearly non-Nazi German government who made doing business with the Church of Scientology illegal.
Well, my point is that this is not a job for LFS, except tangentially in that one could use LFS to make a distro and then make better man pages. I was thinking distributions that are truly distributions should do this.
I also should point out the OpenBSD case is one in which there are some man pages there that aren't elsewhere precisely because they describe things that are only on OpenBSD (much like distros have manpages for their distro-specific tools).
The argument was whether this is a job for the distro maintainers or not, and my point was the OpenBSD team has proven it can be. LFS is not, however, really a distribution in the classic sense, and has a different goal. I was more thinking of the Slackware/RedHat/Debian/etc where there is a goal of making a better operating environment as a whole. To me the LFS is more about making a better Operator.:)
No, business reply mail also says "penalty for misuse." If you somehow managed to mail a BRE to a friend you are stealing at best, and probably tampering with the mail system. Besides I have also seen language on such mail quite often which should indicate to the PO that the mail must only go back to the original business.
However, it's a lawyer's job to represent their client, no matter what stretches in the law they have to make to do so, if the stretch can be made, then they should use it. By the opposite happening at the other end and reasonable judge or jury, this provides the necessary synthesis to provide justice. Then again, juries seem to be more interested in letting people rip money off of big, bad companies than making common sense decisions.
It is also the lawyers' job to give legal advice to their client and to form legal arguments. They cannot blame the client when they come up with cockamamie schemes posing as legal arguments. Besides, when corporations do this sort of thing, it is really the Legal Department (which is made up of lawyers) who comes up with the idea and executes it. So again the Laywers are responsible.
Even if that were not true, lawyers are professionals who are responsible for their actions, and can be sued for malpractice.
In this particular case, the lawyer and client were the same person. Which brings to mind the old adage "Anyone providing legal counsel for oneself has a fool for a client." In this case it was more true than usual.
The eleventh letter of the alphabet is the letter "K"; thus 3 times 11 equals "KKK," or Ku Klux Klan. 311 is sometimes used as a greeting to demonstrate membership in the KKK or simply sympathy with the Klan and its ideology. There is also a popular rock band with the name "311" which is not at all hate-oriented.
Symbology is a funny thing. After all, the pentagram as far as I can tell was originally a symbol used by the followers of Pythagorus (Yes, the A^2 + B^2 = C^2 guy. He also advocated a diet of beans and water, apparently, among other things.) But somewhere along the line witch-hunting christians associated it with worship of the devil and witchcraft. Nowadays there are any number of people who se the symbol for any number of reasons; some say they are witches and do not worship the devil, others say they are not either, and some believe they worship th devil.
Saying a number or symbol is used by a given group is not the same as saying it always means that. To you and I 311 means a band. To some skinhead in idaho (who probably does not know of Pythagorus) it is a symbol that has a special meaning.
The meaning of a symbol is largely in the eye of the beholder. The swastika was an ancient indo-european symbol of life until it was perverted by the nazis. Now most people associate it with hatred and death. None of this is an indictment against the ADL.
You're basically saying, "Yea, I stole the car. But since I didn't know it was against the law, and since it was 10 years ago, I shouldn't be held responsible for it. Plus, I don't agree with the law, thus it shouldn't be obeyed."
No, he is saying he built this house, and years wnet by and he enjoyed the house, then one day some lawyer showed up and accused him of stealing his car, and he said "wtf?" and the lawyer dug in the basement and there hidden in the foundation block was a car. Then the lawyer said he would take the house and everything he owned in reparation for stealing the car.
If it were the opinion of the prosecutors these things were illegal, don't you think there would be more cases than there are now? If there were a lawyer who felt these actions were worthy of suits, don't you think they'd be filing them? BUt that is not what is happening.
I am not just pulling legal opinions out of my ass, I am drawing upon the manifest evidence. And even a layperson should be able to understand the DMCA does not prevent people publishing information about the security in their own programs, which is what Alan Cox was essentially doing. He thought publishing information about patches for security holes in the Linux kernel would violate the DMCA, whereas not one lawyer has stepped forward to validate that claim, and the only cases involving the DMCA are exactly those for which it was created: cases in which someone has cracked the encryption protecting copyrighted material in some fashion and been prosecuted.
No its not legit, nothing on the Anti-Defamation League site is legitimate. The ADL is an organisation dedicated to trying to look like a respectable source of information when it really seeks to decieve. Anyone who is familiar with Scientologys similar front organisations will know exactly what I mean.
Either you should adjust your tin-foil hat, or qualify your statement. What is the ADL a front for? This makes as much sense as the people who claim the ACLU is involved in a plot to destroy our civil liberties, and smells like a canard to me.
So is using xor in an encryption algorithm, and using xor in all kinds of different ways, really. A lot of these probably conflict, but the USPTO does not care, they don't seem to check.
IF available public key encryption patented THEN develop innovative public key protocol ELSE pay for use
This does not work if public key encryption is in itself patented. There are any number of software patents which essentially cover an entire area of technology. Then there is the problem of patents which prevent interoperability, like the 1394 patent Bruce mentioned.
Whereas I doubt very seriously if this patent is held by Apple it will ever be used against Open Source or free software, what happens if Microsoft buys Apple, for an extreme example? Meanwhile, if a patent like this were being actively defended it would mean that at best you could develop your own patent-free technology for high-speed serial connections and hope hardware vendors support that instead of the patented tech they have been working to support for years (riiiiight). In any case, you just would not be able to connect to firewire (or whatever) no matter what.
I think it is kind of odd that even when there are patent-free alternatives, closed-source companies always use the patented version, for which they pay a premium. But then perhaps the patent-free alternatives are never as good as the version for which there is a patent, since they are born out of necessity and not necessarily designed to be better.
Since when is not doing something illegal "making a political statement"?
No one but Alan Cox has said publishing what would have been in the changelog was illegal. The DMCA does not really apply nearly so broadly as some seem to be trying to claim.
I think it is good to be vigilant about laws which affect freedom, but I have noticed a very bad trend such that every law which comes down the pike seems to be interpreted far more broadly and with far more impact by free software advocates than it has been (or ever would be) by the most overzealous corporate lawyer (or any judge). To me, it would seem we are putting weapons in the hands of our enemies that might not have been there. At best, it weakens our case when we try to protest the true impact of some of these laws when we continually cry wolf on them and make claims that lawmakers and judges do not find credible.
Slashdot Mirror
twice two is four
It seems you are overdue for your appointment at miniluv, thought criminal!
I would agree with you on Hitler being "as 'clear' as a mudpuddle". I would even go so far as to say that the things LRH was describing are fairly old, and if you believe his writings, then you would believe the things he described were very old. But since LRH is the founder of the Church of Scientology, and did that, IIRC in the 1960's (but certainly after WWII), I am afraid I am going to have to ask you for some additional evidence to support your claims.
It's hard to prove the truth of spiritual matters in a scientific way. But it is another matter to produce evidence of human beings performing scientific experiments with historical figures (which is essentially what you are describing).
As a seller on eBay for more than 5 years, now with more than 1500 feedback comments (99.2% positive), I have felt every negative for WEEKS! after I have gotten them; getting emails about what went wrong, etc etc. I also KNOW LOTS of eBayers will peruse through feedback, even with my high rating and look for my one or two negatives. Where this really comes into play is if the buyer is a problematic or habitual complainer, they will use your previous negatives as ammo against you to say, "See, you have a past of poor service" (Not that I experience that many problems) Just, it seems the last two negatives I have gotten as an excuse to justify the poster's poor communication skills.
One of the problems here is that many sellers inflate their scores by buying from themselves and leaving positive feedback. On lots of them it is obvious because the positive feedback looks all the same and the negative contradicts it. I have to admit in the past I have specifically looked up negative feedback, partly for this reason, and partly because I am interested in knowing how a given person handles problems. Does s/he ignore all complaints and cry "caveat emptor?" Or does s/he try to fix the problem if s/he possibly can?
This philosophy applies to everyone I do business with in any context. I also tend not to buy without guarantees. So far I have had better luck with ebay than with major stores due to my caution.
And to anyone who thinks that eBay should have been held responsible, I would ask this...should Slashdot now be held responsible for what I am saying in this post?
Microsoft and the Church of Scientology seem to think so. I think it is funny that whereas /. never removed comments before, even those which broke MS agreements, they removed a comment containing what they say is copyrighted material but which is freely available by order of the courts (google for Fishman Affidavit).
The Church of Scientology! 10x as scarier than microsoft and 100x stupider!
I do not think MS' claim would stand up in court, and they have not been willing to try... yet. People are probably ignoring them. But as I understand it, they have a different license for imaging. OEMs for instance consistently image systems they are selling, though the image is approved by Microsoft and puts one in a state such that the license key still has to be entered usually.
I however no longer license Microsoft products, and avoid them even at work. I also take pains not to be responsible for the Microsoft licensing decisions at my current employer. Essentially over the last few years their claims have become increasingly more ludicrous. They have retroactively invalidated Win9x licenses and those for previous Office products, created a new license for XP and newer such that the forced upgrades/annual fees to microsoft are now formalized, and essentially made a serious nuisance of themselves, besides their constant terroristic threats (ever receive one of their audit letters?).
Businesses which continue to rely on Microsoft products have continued to squeak by because at the end of the day unless they are actually forced to undergo the expensive audit process they can essentially ignore a lot of Microsoft's licensing schemes with relative impunity or greatly diminished effect. Besides, legacy technology has them somewhat locked in. I personally think this is a bad model for business and anyone relying on Microsoft for their business is effectively negligent, but that is my opinion.
You have an excellent point most slashbots will have ignored. However, what about the continued dogged pursuit of abandonware sites? Microsoft will not let anyone offer Windows 1.0 or DOS for free (they even have historically attacked people for providing boot floppies). It costs them money to pursue these sites, with lawyers sending letters and surfing for them, etc.
I don't expect them to try to manage an open source dos project, or even release it into the wild. But they clearly see value in spending money chasing people who give away ancient windows versions (and even reselling current ones).
If microsoft controls the hardware, you can bet your booties it will not work with anything but Windows. It may not have to have overt features stopping alternatives (like an encrypted boot process ala PS2 and Xbox) but it won't matter since driver developers will not be given any information to go on, and reverse engineering will be treated as illegal.
Nope. I bet counsumers will eat this up if it meets the users wants and has a low price point.
You and I may not like it, but we don't control the end user market.
Or the corporate market. Who else read that bit about a built-in phone that connects automagically to applications storing information about the caller and brings said apps to the fore immediately after answering the call automatically and thought "Call center managers will eat this up!"
Having tried to install OpenBSD on a Quadra 800 using an external hard drive for swap and wasting hours and hours of time in the attempt, and having successfully installed Windows 98 in a couple hours, I won't take this challenge.
You installed Win98 on a Quadra? Cool! Perhaps you should post a Slashdot article on how you did it; a fine change from the versions of "Linux on a wristwatch" articles.
On a more serious note, I never had a problem getting OpenBSD to work (and IIRC I first instaled it on a Quadra), though I did notice the installer takes some serious getting used to if you aren't used to the bsd way to do things. What are you running on your Quadra now?
You are correct, and Microsoft has specifically said that using Ghost is a violation of their EULA.
Yes, and you will be running a platform with known security vulnerabilities Microsoft will not fix, with no new patches available. Also, ask someone who has actually had the pain of admining an NT4 Exchange Server about uptimes, and why their company bothers paying the $$$ for Win2k and new versions of Exchange, neither of which will run on a p-166. Besides you would have an interesting time running even NT4 and Exchange 5 or something on a p-166, whereas your favorite Linux distro with qmail or sendmail is another matter altogether.
Yeah, I guess if you want anything on windows you have to buy it, NOT. Ever heard of freeware?
On windows this amounts to games and a few odd utilities. Most are not really freeware, but shareware/nagware/spyware/whatever. NONE perform the functions described above.
Windows defragmentation toll was written by a good christian company and banned by Nazi germany.
DisKeeper was created by Executive Software, who are a Scientologist company. The Nazi Germany predates Scientology. It was the clearly non-Nazi German government who made doing business with the Church of Scientology illegal.
Well, my point is that this is not a job for LFS, except tangentially in that one could use LFS to make a distro and then make better man pages. I was thinking distributions that are truly distributions should do this.
I also should point out the OpenBSD case is one in which there are some man pages there that aren't elsewhere precisely because they describe things that are only on OpenBSD (much like distros have manpages for their distro-specific tools).
The argument was whether this is a job for the distro maintainers or not, and my point was the OpenBSD team has proven it can be. LFS is not, however, really a distribution in the classic sense, and has a different goal. I was more thinking of the Slackware/RedHat/Debian/etc where there is a goal of making a better operating environment as a whole. To me the LFS is more about making a better Operator. :)
No, business reply mail also says "penalty for misuse." If you somehow managed to mail a BRE to a friend you are stealing at best, and probably tampering with the mail system. Besides I have also seen language on such mail quite often which should indicate to the PO that the mail must only go back to the original business.
However, it's a lawyer's job to represent their client, no matter what stretches in the law they have to make to do so, if the stretch can be made, then they should use it. By the opposite happening at the other end and reasonable judge or jury, this provides the necessary synthesis to provide justice. Then again, juries seem to be more interested in letting people rip money off of big, bad companies than making common sense decisions.
It is also the lawyers' job to give legal advice to their client and to form legal arguments. They cannot blame the client when they come up with cockamamie schemes posing as legal arguments. Besides, when corporations do this sort of thing, it is really the Legal Department (which is made up of lawyers) who comes up with the idea and executes it. So again the Laywers are responsible.
Even if that were not true, lawyers are professionals who are responsible for their actions, and can be sued for malpractice.
In this particular case, the lawyer and client were the same person. Which brings to mind the old adage "Anyone providing legal counsel for oneself has a fool for a client." In this case it was more true than usual.
The ADL is just slandering an innocent, and seriously kickass band. The fuckers should FOAD.
And you need to take a chill pill. Granted 311 is a pretty good band. But the ADL never said that they are racists. Quite the opposite in fact.
From the ADL page:
The eleventh letter of the alphabet is the letter "K"; thus 3 times 11 equals "KKK," or Ku Klux Klan. 311 is sometimes used as a greeting to demonstrate membership in the KKK or simply sympathy with the Klan and its ideology. There is also a popular rock band with the name "311" which is not at all hate-oriented.
Symbology is a funny thing. After all, the pentagram as far as I can tell was originally a symbol used by the followers of Pythagorus (Yes, the A^2 + B^2 = C^2 guy. He also advocated a diet of beans and water, apparently, among other things.) But somewhere along the line witch-hunting christians associated it with worship of the devil and witchcraft. Nowadays there are any number of people who se the symbol for any number of reasons; some say they are witches and do not worship the devil, others say they are not either, and some believe they worship th devil.
Saying a number or symbol is used by a given group is not the same as saying it always means that. To you and I 311 means a band. To some skinhead in idaho (who probably does not know of Pythagorus) it is a symbol that has a special meaning.
The meaning of a symbol is largely in the eye of the beholder. The swastika was an ancient indo-european symbol of life until it was perverted by the nazis. Now most people associate it with hatred and death. None of this is an indictment against the ADL.
You're basically saying, "Yea, I stole the car. But since I didn't know it was against the law, and since it was 10 years ago, I shouldn't be held responsible for it. Plus, I don't agree with the law, thus it shouldn't be obeyed."
No, he is saying he built this house, and years wnet by and he enjoyed the house, then one day some lawyer showed up and accused him of stealing his car, and he said "wtf?" and the lawyer dug in the basement and there hidden in the foundation block was a car. Then the lawyer said he would take the house and everything he owned in reparation for stealing the car.
Analogies suck, btw.
If it were the opinion of the prosecutors these things were illegal, don't you think there would be more cases than there are now? If there were a lawyer who felt these actions were worthy of suits, don't you think they'd be filing them? BUt that is not what is happening.
I am not just pulling legal opinions out of my ass, I am drawing upon the manifest evidence. And even a layperson should be able to understand the DMCA does not prevent people publishing information about the security in their own programs, which is what Alan Cox was essentially doing. He thought publishing information about patches for security holes in the Linux kernel would violate the DMCA, whereas not one lawyer has stepped forward to validate that claim, and the only cases involving the DMCA are exactly those for which it was created: cases in which someone has cracked the encryption protecting copyrighted material in some fashion and been prosecuted.
And since Cox actually lives in Europe, in this case he probably would be the better choice between the two.
Has the UK joined the EU yet, though? Last I heard there was some wrangling over details...
No its not legit, nothing on the Anti-Defamation League site is legitimate.
The ADL is an organisation dedicated to trying to look like a respectable source of information when it really seeks to decieve.
Anyone who is familiar with Scientologys similar front organisations will know exactly what I mean.
Either you should adjust your tin-foil hat, or qualify your statement. What is the ADL a front for? This makes as much sense as the people who claim the ACLU is involved in a plot to destroy our civil liberties, and smells like a canard to me.
So is using xor in an encryption algorithm, and using xor in all kinds of different ways, really. A lot of these probably conflict, but the USPTO does not care, they don't seem to check.
There is no algorithm that cannot be replaced.
Oh, really?
IF available public key encryption patented
THEN develop innovative public key protocol
ELSE pay for use
This does not work if public key encryption is in itself patented. There are any number of software patents which essentially cover an entire area of technology. Then there is the problem of patents which prevent interoperability, like the 1394 patent Bruce mentioned.
Whereas I doubt very seriously if this patent is held by Apple it will ever be used against Open Source or free software, what happens if Microsoft buys Apple, for an extreme example? Meanwhile, if a patent like this were being actively defended it would mean that at best you could develop your own patent-free technology for high-speed serial connections and hope hardware vendors support that instead of the patented tech they have been working to support for years (riiiiight). In any case, you just would not be able to connect to firewire (or whatever) no matter what.
I think it is kind of odd that even when there are patent-free alternatives, closed-source companies always use the patented version, for which they pay a premium. But then perhaps the patent-free alternatives are never as good as the version for which there is a patent, since they are born out of necessity and not necessarily designed to be better.
Since when is not doing something illegal "making a political statement"?
No one but Alan Cox has said publishing what would have been in the changelog was illegal. The DMCA does not really apply nearly so broadly as some seem to be trying to claim.
I think it is good to be vigilant about laws which affect freedom, but I have noticed a very bad trend such that every law which comes down the pike seems to be interpreted far more broadly and with far more impact by free software advocates than it has been (or ever would be) by the most overzealous corporate lawyer (or any judge). To me, it would seem we are putting weapons in the hands of our enemies that might not have been there. At best, it weakens our case when we try to protest the true impact of some of these laws when we continually cry wolf on them and make claims that lawmakers and judges do not find credible.