It's an OO thing. The attraction of moving to electric or hydrogen-cell cars isn't so much that these are more environmentally friendly *right now* as that it provides a potential for a vast environmental-friendliness advantage because it decouples the method of energy production from energy use.
Yeah, at the moment this electricity or hydrogen would be probably just generated using fossil fuels. But the catch is it doesn't *have* to be. You could substitute a nuclear power plant for that coal-burning one and the electric cars would continue to run just the same... it makes productive change much easier. Whereas if you buy a gasoline-based automobile, it's going to be running on burned fossil fuels forever*.
* Unless you are Doc Brown and you do some retrofitting.
The problem is, it's got a lot of problems that we are simply deferring. Two big ones: risk of disaster, and what to do with the dead fuel rods.
The problem is that in order to avoid these deferred problems with Nuclear, we are simply sticking with fossil fuels, which creates not ONLY a deferred problem which is even WORSE (In a worst case scenario maybe someday if we HAD to, we could shoot several traincars full of fuel rods into the sun. We can't do the same thing to an entire atmospheric layer full of greenhouse gases), but creates real and PRESENT problems *right now*, such as decreased air quality, health hazards, and a slaving of the global economy to those priviliged areas which happen to be high in fossil fuels.
It frustrates me that supposed "greens" are so unwilling to compromise that they are willing to push against a change in the status quo that would be positive to the environment just because they're waiting for some kind of magical efficient renewable energy technology to materialize out of thin air.
Nowhere in the Constitution is it written that freedom of speech implies that private organizations are obligated to provide a soapbox.
The fact that what Disney is doing is legal is totally irrelevant to the question of whether or not it is right.
Therefore, despite what Moore claims, their decision is not censorship.
Censorship does not have to be governmental in nature. One could make a compelling case that at this point moneyed entities pose greater threats to free speech at this point than the U.S. government.
Moore and his slavish followers claim that disagreeing with him is the same as trying to silence him
Actually, no, Moore and his slavish followers claim that prohibiting an owned subsidiary of yours which you normally treat as autonomous from distributing one of Moore's films is the same as trying to "silence him".
Perhaps there's someone somewhere who *does* think that it's censorship to, say, give a Michael Moore movie a bad review, but since I've never actually met this person, it seems like you're pushing something of a straw man here.
> The liberals in this country want open and free discussion.
As long as you ignore all the campaigns against Fox News and talk radio hosts plus speech codes on college campuses, I would agree.
Wait. What "campaigns" I've seen against Fox News and Rush Limbaugh aren't to get them, say, pushed out of their airwave and cable distribution channels and attempt to limit their medium for reaching their customers, but rather campaigns to encourage individual viewers not to support or watch those on the grounds that they display poor journalistic integrity. Didn't you just imply that disagreeing with someone shouldn't be considered the same thing as "silencing" them?
Also: What on earth are "speech codes on college campuses" and, if (as I assume?) this refers to something performed by the administrators of certain colleges, why do you consider college administrators to be representative of whoever or whatever "liberals" are?
I try to follow the policy of that anytime I see anyone using the words "liberal", "conservative", "left" or "right" in anything but an incredibly clearly defined context, I just stop paying attention to the person using them. The words just don't mean anything. And yet people try to reason about them like they're the key to understanding everything that happens in politics.
The problem is that since there's no commonly defined clear demarcation for "left" or "right", this means that people can play the neat trick of constantly reassigning those words to whatever is most convenient at the moment. A favorite tactic seems to be to "prove" something in a piece where you mostly talk about "left" vs "right" while constantly tweaking the definitions of both terms. For example, in one paragraph the word "right" might be used to refer to the current presidential administrators and its followers, in the next paragraph the Coulter/Limbaugh set, in the next libertarians; or in one paragraph the word "left" might refer to extremist feminists, in the next paragraph people who oppose the WTO, in the next current congressional Democrats. The neat thing about this trick is that if you're careful about how you skew your use of these terms, you can (for example) make a flat-out statement about separatist lesbian feminists and then trick the reader into thinking you've shown it applies to Bill Clinton.
Another favorite tactic, and the most common one, seems to be to define "conservative" to be "anyone I agree with" and "liberal" to be "anyone I disagree with", or vice versa...
I personally suspect that anyone that I can catch playing these linguistic games doesn't have anything worthwhile to say, since they're hiding behind ambiguous labels rather than actually arguing in concrete terms. So I try to ignore anyone who talks about "left" vs "right" without clearly identifying which groups they mean by those labels.
Unfortunately the false "liberal"/"conservative" dichotomy has saturated our culture so completely that this policy is very difficult to follow.
You think Moore was booed at the Oscars because the people in that crowd disagreed with him? Hardly. It was the equivalent of modding his rant off-topic.
Right, because using Oscar speech time to make a point rather than just spending four minutes thanking random people the audience has never heard of is something that's totally unaccepted and has never been done before..
Michael Moore won an award for a piece of political commentary, and his speech was a political comment. Is that really that "offtopic"?
At any rate, the important point of Moore's reception to the Oscars wasn't from the people in the building at the time. If you were looking, about 90% of the anti-Moore sentiment on the internet appeared rather suddenly and intensely the moment he gave that oscar speech. Before that he was generally ignored outside of the indie cinema crowd, after that the entire blogosphere erupted in simultaneous smear and anti-smear campaigns against him. Booing at a speech would be a "that was uncalled for at this place and time". Constructing multiple websites alternately "debunking" and just trashing his movie as a response to a personal comment made in a public space, and then widely promoting these sites for months and months, is "disagreeing with what he has to say".
As far as "extremism" goes, I am constantly perplexed by the widely differing standards for "extremism" we are offered for the self-proclaimed "right" and "left". Moore is not flawless as a journalist (though I found "Bowling for Columbine" to have been a rather honest effort at being fair in presentation, aside from the inexplicable diversion where he adopts every tool of the "60 minutes" style shows he complains so much about in order to smear Charlton Heston) but he is not exactly unreasonable in his scope and he tries very hard to back up what he has to say. One wonders what exactly one has to do in order to be left-wing yet not be considered an "extremist", short of being Alan Colmes or something.
Isolated allegation with no supporting evidence. <efaust93> Bold text, refutation of previous allegation with no supporting evidence, contrarian allegation with no supporting evidence.
Welcome to the deep political commentary of slashdot! Tune in next week, when we'll discuss the 2000 election as if it were a black or white issue.
Incidentally, contrary to popular belief, Michael Moore did not miraculously appear from thin air the moment he stepped up to make his Oscar speech and hurt your feelings! He actually existed before that. In fact, he even existed during the Clinton administration. And while I wasn't following him ver closely during that time, I can tell you "Oh, you won't hear anything from moore about Comrade Clinton. He's a saint in the eyes of the left." does not appear to describe his behavior of the period at all. He seems to have criticized Clinton quite a bit. His only film without a journalistic aspect was a wag-the-dog-esque 1995 effort called "Canadian Bacon", in which a Clinton stand-in attempted to fabricate a cold war in order to rally "patriotism" and get the populace to support him blindly. He was one of the loudest voices in the whole "vote Nader, if you vote for Gore you'll be throwing your vote away, he's no better than Bush" thing. Now, he *was* among the people who refused to admit Clinton did anything wrong with the entire Monica Lewinsky scandal and refused to see the impeachment hearing as nothing but a trumped up, politically-motivated abuse of power, but that's hardly unreasonable.
A few years ago when Gentoo popped up, a lot of people said "Do we really need another distro? We already have RedHat, and Debian, and SUSE."
Now, a few years later, RedHat has abandoned its consumer line to a group of volunteers (Fedora), Debian is just.. years behind the other distributions in terms of installed software and catching up at a snail's pace (leaving its excellent toolset and great stability a bit frustratingly useless in practice for the main distro), and SUSE has been purchased by Novell (which has turned out to be benevolent, but it might as likely have turned out not to be). Meanwhile Gentoo, while still not yet a general purpose solution, is maturing at a great rate and is currently a far more attractive solution for many people's purposes than any of these.
I'd say then that the answer to "Do we really need another distro?" Is always yes. The more the merrier. Choice and redundancy are good things.
Because in other domains, "FUD" is generally being targetted at individuals with at least some baground with and capacity to understand the facts at hand. And by "target", I don't mean the intended victim of the FUD. I mean the person the FUD is designed to impact: its reader.
Let's say we're discussing politics. Hypothetically, let's say that George W. Bush goes on television and says we need to invade France because France is sheltering Al-Qaeda. In this case, this is somewhat transparent. The persons seeing GWB say this on television might not be following the news *too* closely, but they have a basic grasp of the situation. They know who Al-Qaeda is. They know who and roughly where France is. They know who George W. Bush is, and have the reasons to know why he might be a biased source of information. They have a basic understanding of how terrorism and international relations work. They probably have an awareness that Al-Qaeda is an organization with tendrils all over the place, including America, thus possibly leading to the suspicion "Al-Qaeda operatives being in France may not be meaningful information, as they're in all these other countries as well", and might even be aware of things like Al Qaeda's more direct connections to, say, Saudi Arabia. They might not have the background to authoritatively agree with or dispute "Al Qaeda is being sheltered by France" but they would certainly know where to check to find these things out.
Now let's say that the ADTI goes public in a number of mainstream news publications and says "Linus stole Linux from somewhere". First off, the person reading this FUD lacks the background. They might have heard of UNIX and Linux, but they probably don't know what they are. They don't know who Linux Tourvalds is. They don't know of the existence of other potentially relevant entities such as Minix or BSD. And crucially, they don't know who the ADTI is, so they won't be going in with the assumption that this person might be trying to mislead them; and they don't know about sites such as (say) slashdot, so they wouldn't know where to go for a second opinion. Second off, the person reading this FUD lacks the capacity to reason about the concepts at hand. Even if one had read some sort of article and knew what Linux, UNIX, BSD, etc are, they wouldn't be able to really see where the flaws in ADTI's statements are. Doing so would require such bits of knowlege as what an operating system is, what "source code" is, what goes into writing a computer program, how difficult it is, what level of expertise you need to do so and how many persons it takes, the legal and copyright implications behind writing computer code "inspired" by other computer code, how one goes about "stealing" computer code, and the history and culture of information sharing. Without having a basic grasp of these things, one cannot make informed decisions about things like what the ADTI is saying, and thus is probably forced to just take it at face value despite it being outright deception.
Because we here at slashdot tend to be a technical crowd, we have the background to generally see promptly through this sort of deception. However, the problem is that we are not the intended target of this FUD. With the persons it's intended for, it is far more successful and this transparency that we are experiencing is simply not the case.
And you would pick this up from the links, but just for the record: Tanenbaum is this european guy who once upon a time in the 80s wrote a textbook on operating systems which came with a simple UNIX-like operating system called "Minix". Ken Brown is some guy who works for something called the "Alex de Torqueville" (sic?) institute and he's writing a book which appears to mostly consist of slander against Linus Tourvalds and/or the Free Software movement.
If I'm reading all these reports right, the summary judgement just concerns the copyrights / "stolen code in linux" claims that SCO had as part of their case, but dropped when the judge ordered them to produce evidence.
What the summary judgement means is IBM is pointing at the big swath of things that SCO claimed then dropped from the case, and asking the judge, "could you *pretend* SCO never dropped those parts, and give us the ruling you would have given if those parts of the case were still in effect, so that we can declare the matter closed and SCO can't make those allegations again later?"
So if the summary judgement's granted, IBM's case will still go on, since it has no bearing on the contract claims that SCO's lawsuit against IBM comprises at this point.
HOWEVER, if the summary judgement is granted, RedHat's case will suddenly start up, since (1) the copyright allegations and slander that the summary judgement concerns is *exactly* what RedHat's case is about and (2) when RedHat's case hit court, it was ruled that that case should be delayed until the IBM case is decided, so (3) since the part of the IBM case that RedHat was waiting on has been summary judgemented, they're free to persue the lanham act thingy against SCO.
This is something I mostly bring up in the debate regarding general spam, but something that is very important to keep in mind is that if we can force spam to originate from outside of the United States, this is a major win. The fact is that every existing form of technical spam prevention-- blacklists, whitelists, graylists, filtering, etc-- are made noticeably easier if one can make assumptions geographically limiting the locations of spammers. Even if by "geographically limit" we just mean "outside the U.S.".
The thing is though I don't know how applicable my argument here is in this particular case, since as far as I'm aware (?) you don't filter porn spam any differently than the rest of it. However, spammers seem to be very loath to subscribe to any kind of law or decency if it means more work for them. Perhaps some spammers will get themselves screwed out of business because they don't follow this law and ISPs sue them.. a thinning of the herd, if you will.
Well, let's look at the industry. For the 30 years before 1981, not a lot happened. The industry was relatively small. Since then, there's been the desktop computing revolution, the rise of the internet as a publicly usable medium, and the software industry has gotten perhaps an orders of magnitude larger in two decades.
What on earth are you talking about?
The Internet existed before 1981. The IPv4 switchover occured in 1983 but had been gradually coming long before anyone knew you could patent software. The packet switching concept predates 1981, for example.
Though its consequences were still in the process of being explored, the desktop GUI as a concept was invented before 1981 and was on active work at the time. Xerox PARC in particular did the bulk of its truly important work before 1981. Smalltalk had been finalized into its modern state. Object Oriented Programming had reached a level of conceptual sophistication rarely seen actually put into practice today, and was available in some very mature implementations. The deep fit between OO and GUI programming was well understood.
UNIX and VMS had pretty much reached their final forms from an architectural standpoint by 1981, and every major non-RTS operating system on the market today is effectively running on either a UNIX architecture (Linux, Mac OS X) or a VMS architecture (Windows NT).
The software industry has gotten an order of magnitude larger since 1981, but one cannot realistically point at patents as a cause for this; that is mere correlation. If you are looking for actual causation, an alternate theory for which you would likely be able to find far better and stronger evidence would be that the software industry has bloomed in the way it has since 1981 because and solely because of improvements in the field of hardware. I would say that the explosion in the size of the software industry has simply been because the fact hardware reached the point the PC was feasible meant computers became more accessible and thus the number of people available to sell software to increased dramatically.
Saying "not a lot happened" before 1981 shows either a deep ignorance of of that period or that you are trying to ignore it.
A lot of people on Slashdot seem to think software development is inherently easier because they understand the process, and they don't understand other engineering processes.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I think that software development is easier than other forms of invention because of the degree to which it can be mechanized. For other sorts of engineering certain sorts of CAD tools exist, but nothing to the degree and flexibility one has with machines.
In particular, with a computer program, going from your schematics to a functioning prototype is a matter of hitting the "compile and run" button. This seems to be a big deal to me in terms of the possibilities it offers to the hobbyist. I have an very, very basic grasp of mechanical and electrical engineering, and I can imagine that if I was willing to put an absolutely huge amount of work into it, I would be able to learn enough more that I would be able to sit down at a table and over time from scratch design an airplane. But what I can't seriously consider likely is that I would be able to design from scratch an even remotely working or quality airplane without ever being able to test it. Were I to sit down and create an operating system from scratch, I could have the computer test it flawlessly for me at every step of the process just by using that compile and run button. But if I were designing that hypothetical airplane, testing would have to be done by me, and would require materials...
I guess the upshot of what I am trying to say is that while, as Mr. "There Is Nothing Which Naturally Occurs Without An Owner" Tulip higher up in this thread muses, there is indeed a financial cost associated with software development, it's a financial cost which stems wholly from programmer time (and, I suppose, the necessity for every single programmer to have a computer, by no means onerous). However every other field of engineering has costs associated with the act of engineering itself, the cost of testing, prototypes, materials for testing and experimentation. It seems to me that simulation can only provide so much and I think the chances in which a human mind could perform quality engineering without some level of direct experimentation are minimal.
That out of all of Microsoft's business costs, the only ones "somebody has to pay for" are the legal costs with the government.
For example, wouldn't it make more sense to point at the approximately three hundred million dollars per quarter that Microsoft has been pissing away on the XBox venture since it began with no apparent plan to move to profitability in sight, and say that perhaps that is the cause of the cost increases? Or what about the MSN division, which last I checked has run very slightly profitable for only one quarter (sometime last year) once with only losses for the entire rest of its entire history? Or-- say-- Windows Media Player? Microsoft's giving it away but there's clearly development costs. Doesn't someone have to pay for that?
It seems absolutely bizarre that Microsoft seems to be trying to make the implication that ventures such as the original IE, or Windows Media Player, really are "free", and just attempts to "stay competitive", and the fact they have all this money from their OS and Office divisions doesn't give them any unfair advantage. Yet then once it becomes advantageous from a PR perspective to do so, they begin trumpeting about how all their costs get passed on to consumers. Well, gee! If the costs of doing business are getting passed on to consumers, then aren't the development costs for IE and WMP being passed on to consumers as well? And if IE and WMP are being paid for via costs passed on to the people who buy Windows, then why does Microsoft claim that these are anything other than forced bundling? Why the "it's free" charade that seems to be the basis of their claim that IE and WMP aren't illegally anticompetitive actions?
I'd say the costs passed on to consumers from Microsoft paying slap-on-the-wrist fees for monopolistic practices are dwarfed by the costs passed on to consumers from Microsoft actually engaging in monopolistic practices in the first place.
We might as well be discussing a rule for eliminating "dubious" entries from a contest for who can pull off the biggest stock fraud scheme.
What comes to mind is a strip of the old comic strip "Ernie". This strip has a running gag about a local group called the "Pirhana club" which has a yearly "Pirhana of the Year" contest which is literally a yearly award to whichever of the members can be the biggest sleazeball.
There's one character in the strip named "Uncle Sid" who wins the contest every year. He's just that much of an asshole.
One year, as the Pirhana of the Year award approached, the strip chronicled various members of the club working overtime to get the award. Sid, though, did nothing, just sitting in the bar, oblivious and drinking while the other members of the club bragged to him about how they were certain to win this year.
And on the strip on the day of the award ceremony, the readers were shown various members of the club around the room, explaining to the person next to them why they're certain they're going to win. A member of the city council brags about demanding kickbacks from an orphanage to retain their funding. A doctor brags about defrauding patients by charging them for surgery he anesthesised them for but did not perform for nonexistent ailments. A used car salesman brags about selling a set of totally nonfunctional cars to a nunnery. And as the announcer calls out "THE WINNER.. IS.. SID", the camera pans to Uncle Sid explaining to Ernie that he stuffed the ballot box.
The next strip simply showed the other lead contenders confronting Sid and demanding to know, "How did you win? What did you do?" And Sid responds, "I cheated. I stuffed the ballot box and bribed the judges."
The disheartened response, after a brief pause was "Damn, you're good."
Wait... isn't "multiple core" technology that thing that the people who make PPC chips were making a huge deal about how they'd be introducing it soon when the G4 was first introduced, then quietly dropped?
Basically destroys the whole purpose of the service, doesn't it?
What makes you so sure that isn't the RIAA's goal? The brick-and-mortar model is easier for the RIAA to exert control over, and the iTMS is exposing people to independent music that maybe they would have had a difficult time finding otherwise. Maybe the RIAA thinks its in their best interest to kill off online music and then go "see, online music doesn't work".
It isn't just G4 has an even smaller niche audience, it's that G4 has an even smaller niche audience which hates it. I spend time looking at video game news/discussion sites, and G4 seems to be universally reviled as pointless, artificial and just plain stupid among the exact people who appear to be their target audience.
Obviously what I've seen isn't fully representative of the video game "fan" audience, but the thing is that G4 viewers aren't just a minority of the people I've seen-- they've been totally nonexistent. The most positive thing I've seen said about G4 ever is one person on a message board once who said they liked G4 because it made good "background noise". This as opposed to TechTV, which seems to have a relatively large, diverse, and visible favorable following.
As a non-cable subscriber, I cannot comment myself on the quality of either channel, since instead of watching television I just play video games and read Slashdot.
Yeah, but Microsoft is a corporation. Wise != Profitable.
Alas, this is only becuase of Microsoft's interesting position where security or safety flaws in their products never have any consequences whatsoever for Microsoft, only for Microsoft's customers. If only Microsoft were in some fashion accountable for the messes their products made on the internet, then acting wisely would be profitable...
Please read this comment. It basically says it all.
SCO has stopped distributing Linux, though they may get in trouble over the whole GPL MAD thing due to whatever GPLed components are in the LKP.
The fact is, SCO doesn't prove much of anything because SCO is failing at what they are doing. They're having no positive progress in any of their court cases and at least one of the judges has been shown to be very unhappy with their in-court behavior. They're losing money. The only way they can be viewed as any form of success over the last two years is if you believe in the stock pump&udmp or "microsoft PR shill" theories.
SCO is dead. The only reason they are able to still look alive is that they are exploiting the slowness of the U.S. court system. The correction to this is coming. While obviously I can't know for sure. I think you can be pretty sure that the fact SCO willingly distributed Linux under GPL terms for quite some time after they started making claims against Linux is going to hurt them *seriously* if they survive long enough for the Redhat case against them to come to trial.
So if I were to write some code and release it under the GPL, could I simultaneously license the same code to a company that wants to add it to their proprietary product?
They get around the contributions thing by having a policy, similar to the GNU project, that any contributed code will not be merged into the main tree unless the author assigns copyright to MySQL AB.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an OO thing. The attraction of moving to electric or hydrogen-cell cars isn't so much that these are more environmentally friendly *right now* as that it provides a potential for a vast environmental-friendliness advantage because it decouples the method of energy production from energy use.
Yeah, at the moment this electricity or hydrogen would be probably just generated using fossil fuels. But the catch is it doesn't *have* to be. You could substitute a nuclear power plant for that coal-burning one and the electric cars would continue to run just the same... it makes productive change much easier. Whereas if you buy a gasoline-based automobile, it's going to be running on burned fossil fuels forever*.
* Unless you are Doc Brown and you do some retrofitting.
The problem is, it's got a lot of problems that we are simply deferring. Two big ones: risk of disaster, and what to do with the dead fuel rods.
The problem is that in order to avoid these deferred problems with Nuclear, we are simply sticking with fossil fuels, which creates not ONLY a deferred problem which is even WORSE (In a worst case scenario maybe someday if we HAD to, we could shoot several traincars full of fuel rods into the sun. We can't do the same thing to an entire atmospheric layer full of greenhouse gases), but creates real and PRESENT problems *right now*, such as decreased air quality, health hazards, and a slaving of the global economy to those priviliged areas which happen to be high in fossil fuels.
It frustrates me that supposed "greens" are so unwilling to compromise that they are willing to push against a change in the status quo that would be positive to the environment just because they're waiting for some kind of magical efficient renewable energy technology to materialize out of thin air.
Nowhere in the Constitution is it written that freedom of speech implies that private organizations are obligated to provide a soapbox.
The fact that what Disney is doing is legal is totally irrelevant to the question of whether or not it is right.
Therefore, despite what Moore claims, their decision is not censorship.
Censorship does not have to be governmental in nature. One could make a compelling case that at this point moneyed entities pose greater threats to free speech at this point than the U.S. government.
Moore and his slavish followers claim that disagreeing with him is the same as trying to silence him
Actually, no, Moore and his slavish followers claim that prohibiting an owned subsidiary of yours which you normally treat as autonomous from distributing one of Moore's films is the same as trying to "silence him".
Perhaps there's someone somewhere who *does* think that it's censorship to, say, give a Michael Moore movie a bad review, but since I've never actually met this person, it seems like you're pushing something of a straw man here.
> The liberals in this country want open and free discussion.
As long as you ignore all the campaigns against Fox News and talk radio hosts plus speech codes on college campuses, I would agree.
Wait. What "campaigns" I've seen against Fox News and Rush Limbaugh aren't to get them, say, pushed out of their airwave and cable distribution channels and attempt to limit their medium for reaching their customers, but rather campaigns to encourage individual viewers not to support or watch those on the grounds that they display poor journalistic integrity. Didn't you just imply that disagreeing with someone shouldn't be considered the same thing as "silencing" them?
Also: What on earth are "speech codes on college campuses" and, if (as I assume?) this refers to something performed by the administrators of certain colleges, why do you consider college administrators to be representative of whoever or whatever "liberals" are?
I try to follow the policy of that anytime I see anyone using the words "liberal", "conservative", "left" or "right" in anything but an incredibly clearly defined context, I just stop paying attention to the person using them. The words just don't mean anything. And yet people try to reason about them like they're the key to understanding everything that happens in politics.
The problem is that since there's no commonly defined clear demarcation for "left" or "right", this means that people can play the neat trick of constantly reassigning those words to whatever is most convenient at the moment. A favorite tactic seems to be to "prove" something in a piece where you mostly talk about "left" vs "right" while constantly tweaking the definitions of both terms. For example, in one paragraph the word "right" might be used to refer to the current presidential administrators and its followers, in the next paragraph the Coulter/Limbaugh set, in the next libertarians; or in one paragraph the word "left" might refer to extremist feminists, in the next paragraph people who oppose the WTO, in the next current congressional Democrats. The neat thing about this trick is that if you're careful about how you skew your use of these terms, you can (for example) make a flat-out statement about separatist lesbian feminists and then trick the reader into thinking you've shown it applies to Bill Clinton.
Another favorite tactic, and the most common one, seems to be to define "conservative" to be "anyone I agree with" and "liberal" to be "anyone I disagree with", or vice versa...
I personally suspect that anyone that I can catch playing these linguistic games doesn't have anything worthwhile to say, since they're hiding behind ambiguous labels rather than actually arguing in concrete terms. So I try to ignore anyone who talks about "left" vs "right" without clearly identifying which groups they mean by those labels.
Unfortunately the false "liberal"/"conservative" dichotomy has saturated our culture so completely that this policy is very difficult to follow.
You think Moore was booed at the Oscars because the people in that crowd disagreed with him? Hardly. It was the equivalent of modding his rant off-topic.
Right, because using Oscar speech time to make a point rather than just spending four minutes thanking random people the audience has never heard of is something that's totally unaccepted and has never been done before..
Michael Moore won an award for a piece of political commentary, and his speech was a political comment. Is that really that "offtopic"?
At any rate, the important point of Moore's reception to the Oscars wasn't from the people in the building at the time. If you were looking, about 90% of the anti-Moore sentiment on the internet appeared rather suddenly and intensely the moment he gave that oscar speech. Before that he was generally ignored outside of the indie cinema crowd, after that the entire blogosphere erupted in simultaneous smear and anti-smear campaigns against him. Booing at a speech would be a "that was uncalled for at this place and time". Constructing multiple websites alternately "debunking" and just trashing his movie as a response to a personal comment made in a public space, and then widely promoting these sites for months and months, is "disagreeing with what he has to say".
As far as "extremism" goes, I am constantly perplexed by the widely differing standards for "extremism" we are offered for the self-proclaimed "right" and "left". Moore is not flawless as a journalist (though I found "Bowling for Columbine" to have been a rather honest effort at being fair in presentation, aside from the inexplicable diversion where he adopts every tool of the "60 minutes" style shows he complains so much about in order to smear Charlton Heston) but he is not exactly unreasonable in his scope and he tries very hard to back up what he has to say. One wonders what exactly one has to do in order to be left-wing yet not be considered an "extremist", short of being Alan Colmes or something.
Isolated allegation with no supporting evidence.
<efaust93> Bold text, refutation of previous allegation with no supporting evidence, contrarian allegation with no supporting evidence.
Welcome to the deep political commentary of slashdot! Tune in next week, when we'll discuss the 2000 election as if it were a black or white issue.
Incidentally, contrary to popular belief, Michael Moore did not miraculously appear from thin air the moment he stepped up to make his Oscar speech and hurt your feelings! He actually existed before that. In fact, he even existed during the Clinton administration. And while I wasn't following him ver closely during that time, I can tell you "Oh, you won't hear anything from moore about Comrade Clinton. He's a saint in the eyes of the left." does not appear to describe his behavior of the period at all. He seems to have criticized Clinton quite a bit. His only film without a journalistic aspect was a wag-the-dog-esque 1995 effort called "Canadian Bacon", in which a Clinton stand-in attempted to fabricate a cold war in order to rally "patriotism" and get the populace to support him blindly. He was one of the loudest voices in the whole "vote Nader, if you vote for Gore you'll be throwing your vote away, he's no better than Bush" thing. Now, he *was* among the people who refused to admit Clinton did anything wrong with the entire Monica Lewinsky scandal and refused to see the impeachment hearing as nothing but a trumped up, politically-motivated abuse of power, but that's hardly unreasonable.
Do we really need another distro?
A few years ago when Gentoo popped up, a lot of people said "Do we really need another distro? We already have RedHat, and Debian, and SUSE."
Now, a few years later, RedHat has abandoned its consumer line to a group of volunteers (Fedora), Debian is just.. years behind the other distributions in terms of installed software and catching up at a snail's pace (leaving its excellent toolset and great stability a bit frustratingly useless in practice for the main distro), and SUSE has been purchased by Novell (which has turned out to be benevolent, but it might as likely have turned out not to be). Meanwhile Gentoo, while still not yet a general purpose solution, is maturing at a great rate and is currently a far more attractive solution for many people's purposes than any of these.
I'd say then that the answer to "Do we really need another distro?" Is always yes. The more the merrier. Choice and redundancy are good things.
Because in other domains, "FUD" is generally being targetted at individuals with at least some baground with and capacity to understand the facts at hand. And by "target", I don't mean the intended victim of the FUD. I mean the person the FUD is designed to impact: its reader.
Let's say we're discussing politics. Hypothetically, let's say that George W. Bush goes on television and says we need to invade France because France is sheltering Al-Qaeda. In this case, this is somewhat transparent. The persons seeing GWB say this on television might not be following the news *too* closely, but they have a basic grasp of the situation. They know who Al-Qaeda is. They know who and roughly where France is. They know who George W. Bush is, and have the reasons to know why he might be a biased source of information. They have a basic understanding of how terrorism and international relations work. They probably have an awareness that Al-Qaeda is an organization with tendrils all over the place, including America, thus possibly leading to the suspicion "Al-Qaeda operatives being in France may not be meaningful information, as they're in all these other countries as well", and might even be aware of things like Al Qaeda's more direct connections to, say, Saudi Arabia. They might not have the background to authoritatively agree with or dispute "Al Qaeda is being sheltered by France" but they would certainly know where to check to find these things out.
Now let's say that the ADTI goes public in a number of mainstream news publications and says "Linus stole Linux from somewhere". First off, the person reading this FUD lacks the background. They might have heard of UNIX and Linux, but they probably don't know what they are. They don't know who Linux Tourvalds is. They don't know of the existence of other potentially relevant entities such as Minix or BSD. And crucially, they don't know who the ADTI is, so they won't be going in with the assumption that this person might be trying to mislead them; and they don't know about sites such as (say) slashdot, so they wouldn't know where to go for a second opinion. Second off, the person reading this FUD lacks the capacity to reason about the concepts at hand. Even if one had read some sort of article and knew what Linux, UNIX, BSD, etc are, they wouldn't be able to really see where the flaws in ADTI's statements are. Doing so would require such bits of knowlege as what an operating system is, what "source code" is, what goes into writing a computer program, how difficult it is, what level of expertise you need to do so and how many persons it takes, the legal and copyright implications behind writing computer code "inspired" by other computer code, how one goes about "stealing" computer code, and the history and culture of information sharing. Without having a basic grasp of these things, one cannot make informed decisions about things like what the ADTI is saying, and thus is probably forced to just take it at face value despite it being outright deception.
Because we here at slashdot tend to be a technical crowd, we have the background to generally see promptly through this sort of deception. However, the problem is that we are not the intended target of this FUD. With the persons it's intended for, it is far more successful and this transparency that we are experiencing is simply not the case.
It isn't that you're "out of the know" it's just that you didn't see the previous article on this subject on slashdot two days ago.
You want to read this article. It should explain what is happening.
And you would pick this up from the links, but just for the record: Tanenbaum is this european guy who once upon a time in the 80s wrote a textbook on operating systems which came with a simple UNIX-like operating system called "Minix". Ken Brown is some guy who works for something called the "Alex de Torqueville" (sic?) institute and he's writing a book which appears to mostly consist of slander against Linus Tourvalds and/or the Free Software movement.
If I'm reading all these reports right, the summary judgement just concerns the copyrights / "stolen code in linux" claims that SCO had as part of their case, but dropped when the judge ordered them to produce evidence.
What the summary judgement means is IBM is pointing at the big swath of things that SCO claimed then dropped from the case, and asking the judge, "could you *pretend* SCO never dropped those parts, and give us the ruling you would have given if those parts of the case were still in effect, so that we can declare the matter closed and SCO can't make those allegations again later?"
So if the summary judgement's granted, IBM's case will still go on, since it has no bearing on the contract claims that SCO's lawsuit against IBM comprises at this point.
HOWEVER, if the summary judgement is granted, RedHat's case will suddenly start up, since (1) the copyright allegations and slander that the summary judgement concerns is *exactly* what RedHat's case is about and (2) when RedHat's case hit court, it was ruled that that case should be delayed until the IBM case is decided, so (3) since the part of the IBM case that RedHat was waiting on has been summary judgemented, they're free to persue the lanham act thingy against SCO.
Is the above the case?
Now that's market penetration
This is something I mostly bring up in the debate regarding general spam, but something that is very important to keep in mind is that if we can force spam to originate from outside of the United States, this is a major win. The fact is that every existing form of technical spam prevention-- blacklists, whitelists, graylists, filtering, etc-- are made noticeably easier if one can make assumptions geographically limiting the locations of spammers. Even if by "geographically limit" we just mean "outside the U.S.".
The thing is though I don't know how applicable my argument here is in this particular case, since as far as I'm aware (?) you don't filter porn spam any differently than the rest of it. However, spammers seem to be very loath to subscribe to any kind of law or decency if it means more work for them. Perhaps some spammers will get themselves screwed out of business because they don't follow this law and ISPs sue them.. a thinning of the herd, if you will.
Well, let's look at the industry. For the 30 years before 1981, not a lot happened. The industry was relatively small. Since then, there's been the desktop computing revolution, the rise of the internet as a publicly usable medium, and the software industry has gotten perhaps an orders of magnitude larger in two decades.
What on earth are you talking about?
The Internet existed before 1981. The IPv4 switchover occured in 1983 but had been gradually coming long before anyone knew you could patent software. The packet switching concept predates 1981, for example.
Though its consequences were still in the process of being explored, the desktop GUI as a concept was invented before 1981 and was on active work at the time. Xerox PARC in particular did the bulk of its truly important work before 1981. Smalltalk had been finalized into its modern state. Object Oriented Programming had reached a level of conceptual sophistication rarely seen actually put into practice today, and was available in some very mature implementations. The deep fit between OO and GUI programming was well understood.
UNIX and VMS had pretty much reached their final forms from an architectural standpoint by 1981, and every major non-RTS operating system on the market today is effectively running on either a UNIX architecture (Linux, Mac OS X) or a VMS architecture (Windows NT).
The software industry has gotten an order of magnitude larger since 1981, but one cannot realistically point at patents as a cause for this; that is mere correlation. If you are looking for actual causation, an alternate theory for which you would likely be able to find far better and stronger evidence would be that the software industry has bloomed in the way it has since 1981 because and solely because of improvements in the field of hardware. I would say that the explosion in the size of the software industry has simply been because the fact hardware reached the point the PC was feasible meant computers became more accessible and thus the number of people available to sell software to increased dramatically.
Saying "not a lot happened" before 1981 shows either a deep ignorance of of that period or that you are trying to ignore it.
There would be significantly less reason to "innovate" in this way if a competitor could copy them exactly if it was successful.
But Apple's competitors do copy them exactly when they are successful, and yet Apple does continue to innovate.
How do you explain this?
I agree with you but I must differ on one point.
A lot of people on Slashdot seem to think software development is inherently easier because they understand the process, and they don't understand other engineering processes.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I think that software development is easier than other forms of invention because of the degree to which it can be mechanized. For other sorts of engineering certain sorts of CAD tools exist, but nothing to the degree and flexibility one has with machines.
In particular, with a computer program, going from your schematics to a functioning prototype is a matter of hitting the "compile and run" button. This seems to be a big deal to me in terms of the possibilities it offers to the hobbyist. I have an very, very basic grasp of mechanical and electrical engineering, and I can imagine that if I was willing to put an absolutely huge amount of work into it, I would be able to learn enough more that I would be able to sit down at a table and over time from scratch design an airplane. But what I can't seriously consider likely is that I would be able to design from scratch an even remotely working or quality airplane without ever being able to test it. Were I to sit down and create an operating system from scratch, I could have the computer test it flawlessly for me at every step of the process just by using that compile and run button. But if I were designing that hypothetical airplane, testing would have to be done by me, and would require materials...
I guess the upshot of what I am trying to say is that while, as Mr. "There Is Nothing Which Naturally Occurs Without An Owner" Tulip higher up in this thread muses, there is indeed a financial cost associated with software development, it's a financial cost which stems wholly from programmer time (and, I suppose, the necessity for every single programmer to have a computer, by no means onerous). However every other field of engineering has costs associated with the act of engineering itself, the cost of testing, prototypes, materials for testing and experimentation. It seems to me that simulation can only provide so much and I think the chances in which a human mind could perform quality engineering without some level of direct experimentation are minimal.
*shrug*
Hmm. Except the SegWay isn't software...
That out of all of Microsoft's business costs, the only ones "somebody has to pay for" are the legal costs with the government.
For example, wouldn't it make more sense to point at the approximately three hundred million dollars per quarter that Microsoft has been pissing away on the XBox venture since it began with no apparent plan to move to profitability in sight, and say that perhaps that is the cause of the cost increases? Or what about the MSN division, which last I checked has run very slightly profitable for only one quarter (sometime last year) once with only losses for the entire rest of its entire history? Or-- say-- Windows Media Player? Microsoft's giving it away but there's clearly development costs. Doesn't someone have to pay for that?
It seems absolutely bizarre that Microsoft seems to be trying to make the implication that ventures such as the original IE, or Windows Media Player, really are "free", and just attempts to "stay competitive", and the fact they have all this money from their OS and Office divisions doesn't give them any unfair advantage. Yet then once it becomes advantageous from a PR perspective to do so, they begin trumpeting about how all their costs get passed on to consumers. Well, gee! If the costs of doing business are getting passed on to consumers, then aren't the development costs for IE and WMP being passed on to consumers as well? And if IE and WMP are being paid for via costs passed on to the people who buy Windows, then why does Microsoft claim that these are anything other than forced bundling? Why the "it's free" charade that seems to be the basis of their claim that IE and WMP aren't illegally anticompetitive actions?
I'd say the costs passed on to consumers from Microsoft paying slap-on-the-wrist fees for monopolistic practices are dwarfed by the costs passed on to consumers from Microsoft actually engaging in monopolistic practices in the first place.
We might as well be discussing a rule for eliminating "dubious" entries from a contest for who can pull off the biggest stock fraud scheme.
What comes to mind is a strip of the old comic strip "Ernie". This strip has a running gag about a local group called the "Pirhana club" which has a yearly "Pirhana of the Year" contest which is literally a yearly award to whichever of the members can be the biggest sleazeball.
There's one character in the strip named "Uncle Sid" who wins the contest every year. He's just that much of an asshole.
One year, as the Pirhana of the Year award approached, the strip chronicled various members of the club working overtime to get the award. Sid, though, did nothing, just sitting in the bar, oblivious and drinking while the other members of the club bragged to him about how they were certain to win this year.
And on the strip on the day of the award ceremony, the readers were shown various members of the club around the room, explaining to the person next to them why they're certain they're going to win. A member of the city council brags about demanding kickbacks from an orphanage to retain their funding. A doctor brags about defrauding patients by charging them for surgery he anesthesised them for but did not perform for nonexistent ailments. A used car salesman brags about selling a set of totally nonfunctional cars to a nunnery. And as the announcer calls out "THE WINNER.. IS.. SID", the camera pans to Uncle Sid explaining to Ernie that he stuffed the ballot box.
The next strip simply showed the other lead contenders confronting Sid and demanding to know, "How did you win? What did you do?" And Sid responds, "I cheated. I stuffed the ballot box and bribed the judges."
The disheartened response, after a brief pause was "Damn, you're good."
Wait... isn't "multiple core" technology that thing that the people who make PPC chips were making a huge deal about how they'd be introducing it soon when the G4 was first introduced, then quietly dropped?
Basically destroys the whole purpose of the service, doesn't it?
What makes you so sure that isn't the RIAA's goal? The brick-and-mortar model is easier for the RIAA to exert control over, and the iTMS is exposing people to independent music that maybe they would have had a difficult time finding otherwise. Maybe the RIAA thinks its in their best interest to kill off online music and then go "see, online music doesn't work".
It isn't just G4 has an even smaller niche audience, it's that G4 has an even smaller niche audience which hates it. I spend time looking at video game news/discussion sites, and G4 seems to be universally reviled as pointless, artificial and just plain stupid among the exact people who appear to be their target audience.
Obviously what I've seen isn't fully representative of the video game "fan" audience, but the thing is that G4 viewers aren't just a minority of the people I've seen-- they've been totally nonexistent. The most positive thing I've seen said about G4 ever is one person on a message board once who said they liked G4 because it made good "background noise". This as opposed to TechTV, which seems to have a relatively large, diverse, and visible favorable following.
As a non-cable subscriber, I cannot comment myself on the quality of either channel, since instead of watching television I just play video games and read Slashdot.
Yeah, but Microsoft is a corporation. Wise != Profitable.
Alas, this is only becuase of Microsoft's interesting position where security or safety flaws in their products never have any consequences whatsoever for Microsoft, only for Microsoft's customers. If only Microsoft were in some fashion accountable for the messes their products made on the internet, then acting wisely would be profitable...
Please read this comment. It basically says it all.
SCO has stopped distributing Linux, though they may get in trouble over the whole GPL MAD thing due to whatever GPLed components are in the LKP.
The fact is, SCO doesn't prove much of anything because SCO is failing at what they are doing. They're having no positive progress in any of their court cases and at least one of the judges has been shown to be very unhappy with their in-court behavior. They're losing money. The only way they can be viewed as any form of success over the last two years is if you believe in the stock pump&udmp or "microsoft PR shill" theories.
SCO is dead. The only reason they are able to still look alive is that they are exploiting the slowness of the U.S. court system. The correction to this is coming. While obviously I can't know for sure. I think you can be pretty sure that the fact SCO willingly distributed Linux under GPL terms for quite some time after they started making claims against Linux is going to hurt them *seriously* if they survive long enough for the Redhat case against them to come to trial.
So if I were to write some code and release it under the GPL, could I simultaneously license the same code to a company that wants to add it to their proprietary product?
Yes. In fact, the people who make MySQL do exactly that.
They get around the contributions thing by having a policy, similar to the GNU project, that any contributed code will not be merged into the main tree unless the author assigns copyright to MySQL AB.