Quick question. In a previous Dragon-related thread on slashdot someone claimed that it would not be possible to sell the Dragon internationally becuase it is based on patented technologies that the patent owners have chosen not to do anything with. For the Dragon chip, the Chinese government hand-waved those patents away, but outside of China those patents would still apply and the chip would not be possible to sell.
Go stand at Toys R. Us, or Best Buy. Wait until someone seems to be about to buy an x-box.
Then tell them what you have just told us, that after you buy the x-box, it won't be your hardware, it will still belong to Microsoft. If they seem incredulous, explain to them exactly how and why this is the case.
See how many of them actually buy the x-box after that. I'd be curious.
Why bother sending people to an Earth-crossing asteroid? And why bother with a lunar base?
Incremental steps?
Trying to do everything at once would be *stupid*. You want to take this one step at a time. Sending people to an asteroid, or building a base on the moon, will teach us valuable lessons that will be directly applicable to going to mars. If there turns out to be something dramatically problematic about our initial base-on-other-celestial-bodies technology, we want to find out about this EARLY, and we want to find out about this on the moon, where we sort of have the ability to rescue and recover, not when the astronauts are a hundred gigameters away and we've spent months getting them there. If we're going to be building craft that can go a longish way away and interact with a body that isn't simply orbiting around the earth, we want to visit something slightly closer than mars first to work out the kinks in our technology.
Remember, Kennedy's "the moon in 10 years" speech was in 1961. The apollo program didn't begin until 1967. Would you argue that they were wasting time with their intermediate steps in Mercury and Gemini, doing things such as building multiperson spacecraft and sending them into space just to have them come right back again? After all, the goal wasn't always necessarily any science or anything useful, it was sometimes just to do it for its own sake, to see how hard it was.
While I do agree it's a reasonable worry that they'll begin this plan and then not commit the money later on... other than forcing congress into commitment (and they've committed $250million over two years for this plan, if it passes), all your concerns are actually addressed *in the bill*. We need an infrastructure in orbit around Earth before we can start sending things to the moon.... the bill seems to actually *provide milestones specifically to set that infrastructure up*.
Larger space stations,
From the bill: "(20) Completion of the International Space Station with a full crew complement of 7 astronauts and robust research capabilities is essential if the United States is to carry out successfully a comprehensive initiative of scientific exploration of the solar system that involves human space flight.". No milestones are mandated in the bill for space stations, but this and other language in the bill would seem to imply that building additional space station facilities as needed are by the bill deemed necessary to fill out the bill's milestones.
orbital manufacturing,
From the bill: "(1) Within 8 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the development and flight demonstration of a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from low Earth orbit to the L 1 and L 2 Earth-Sun libration points and back for the purposes of assembling large-scale space structures such as would be required for scientific observatories, to the Earth-Moon libration points and back, and to lunar orbit and back."
and perhaps craft designed solely for use in space, to ship people and material to the moon.
Between 10 and 20 years from now, the bill would require: "the development and flight demonstration" of "a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from low Earth orbit to and from an Earth-orbit crossing asteroid and rendezvousing with it."; "a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon and back"; and "a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from low Earth orbit to and from Martian orbit".
What, exactly, is it about this bill that you find unrealistic, then? Do you believe there are steps missing that would have to happen, but would not happen unless specifically mandated in the bill? Do you believe that $250 million over the first two years is not enough? Fears that in 5 years the budget for this timeline will be lost is a very bad reason *never* to *try* the timeline.
Should resale of iTunes songs hurt their business, they can crack down without appearing to be hypocrites. "after further research it appears to be illegal".
Either that, or their response means "This sounds legal and acceptable to us, but we aren't going to come right out and say that, because we're afraid later that Universal will decide they don't think it should be legal and sue us for explitly and publicly giving consumers permission to exercise their right of first sale."
Or it means "I, Peter Lowe, am a marketing director, and so I can make public statements to the press, but I can't actually definitively say the resale thing is legal because saying that publicly would be basically setting policy, and I don't have the authority to set policy, and neither Apple Legal nor the people in charge of that have taken time to make a decision on this yet."
As for your examples of 'extreme examples', they are already used all over the place. Here, look. "Knife Death".. "Pool Death".. "Sea Death".. "Choking Death". Hey, look at that, the I'm Feeling Lucky for all four of those leads to a news article where the term is used in the headline. (Well, one is "Candy Choking Death".)
It was a death by way of a gun. It was a gun death. There's nothing anti-gun or newspeak about that it's just.. like.. an idiom.
Yeah, I used preview, but it's late and i'm tired..
Where I said "The Gamecube outsold the PS2 last week".. that is a typo. What it should have said is "The Gamecube outsold the PS2 last week IN JAPAN". This is still a very significant event, but not quite so much so as my typo'd version implied.:) My reference is here..
This is a standard gambit. People do it to Apple all the time. Your company is doing poorly, so you write off a section of your company and use it to make you seem important. This announcement has two purposes. The first is that it lets them retreat out of the GameCube market and make it seem like Nintendo's fault, not theirs-- the media reports it as "*Nintendo is dying" not "Eidos has failed to make any compelling gamecube titles". (The truth would be somewhere in between, along the lines of "The games Eidos has been releasing for Gamecube are not enough to justify the expense of training and porting to the Gamecube." But that isn't going to get reported in any case, because it isn't very sensationalistic.) The second purpose is it makes Eidos seem important. Your gut reaction on hearing this article is something like "Wow, if companies as significant as Eidos are abandoning the GC, Nintendo must be in trouble." This thought comes automatically enough you don't stop to think, wait a minute, Eidos isn't particularly one of the significant companies right now.
Saying the Gamecube is dying is rediculous. It isn't number one and isn't going to be there probably ever. But it's doing very, *very* far from poorly. There have been a number of times over the GC's life cycle that it has been fair to say "OK, nintendo is in trouble", but this is definitely not one of them. This is the one of the GOOD spots. Nintendo is making *profits* on the GC, which is certainly more than Microsoft can say. The Gamecube outsold the PS2 last week. And the Gamecube is entering one of its best bits of game library in a LONG time. After a long, long summer of drought among GC games, with nothing of note being released but MegaMan, we just got F-Zero and (yes, cross-platform) Soul Calibur 2 released last week. Coming next month is Kirby's Air Ride, TMNT, XIII, that wierd sega Billy Hatcher thing, and Viewtiful Joe. At least two of these October games look to be legitimate blockbusters. The month after that Super Mario Kart is coming out, and that's one of Nintendo's most successful titles. That's an IMPRESSIVE crop of games, and when that crop of games grows totally old, it will be about March, which is when Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Pikmin 2 are released. I'm not going to say anything as to how this stacks up to how PS2/xbox are doing at the moment because I'm not qualified to comment on that, but one thing is certain: This is *NOT* a moment of "decline" of any sort for the Gamecube and Eidos' statement its a closing-down market is just silly.
And even if this weren't the case and the GC weren't succeeding on its own merits, the GBA looks to be making enough money and kicking enough ass that Nintendo could prop up a failing GC unit for about as long as Microsoft would bother to prop up a failing xbox unit..
Either way, Eidos leaving makes VERY little difference. I'm sure they make great stuff for other platforms, and I really liked the first two (first two) tomb raider games. But Eidos on the Gamecube? Hell, I can't even name you *ONE* game they made for the GC. Was that "timesplitters" thing theirs? Whatever it is they've been releasing for the GC, it hasn't been exceptional enough or marketed well enough to stay in my memory.. If my single data point is indicative of GC owners in general, that might have to do with why they aren't making any money on the GC.
The generator should be part of the build cycle. If you want to change the generated code snippet, change the generator!
See, now this I agree with heartily and I think it's a really neat idea. I'm not quite sure I'd do it, but it's certainly a viable strategy. I wish there were a term to separate that from the sort of code generation that seems to be being discussed in the article here and linked. One is generating code and then using it, the other is something akin almost more to defining your own programming language.. I don't know. While the only difference between the two types of code generation is when the generation happens, I really kind of see them as two quite different approaches, one of which is a good idea, one of which is a bad idea..:)
But I think I'm going to continue the plan i've been following for awhile of buying almost exclusively from independent/foreign labels anyway, just becuase I like the music better. My friends have been telling me the new albums by the Rapture and the Postal Service are really good..
Okay, maybe I'll get that evanescence album eventually. But by and large my RIAA purchases have fallen to nearly nil over the last couple years. And I'm not even trying. If I felt like it I could move into active boycott mode without feeling I'm missing anything from my life. I'm not quite there yet, but either way, I for one am not going to be buying any more Universal albums than before just because in general they don't have the stuff I'm interested in anymore..
Code Generation is for people who don't understand or are too lazy for abstraction, and it will ALWAYS have the problem of, what if you want to go through all your projects and change one single thing about the generated part of your code? What if you have a hundred tiny projects, each of which contains the generated code snippet that needs to be changed? Let's hope either the change you want to make is very simple or you are very good at regular expressions.
If you are able to clearly separate your code into "You can edit here" and "You cannot edit here" chunks, you can DEFINITELY seperate your code clearly into local chunks and delegated chunks-- i.e., "you cannot edit here" means you just do stuff, "you can edit here" means you talk to a delegate object or method. If EJBs are so frigging complicated that you have to do a bunch of repetitive grunt work that's the same every time you do it, you should somehow be building a slightly higher-level abstraction off of the things you do in common on each EJB and working from there. If EJB does not make this possible you should perhaps not be using EJB. There's always some way to do these things through abstraction, and it will ALWAYS in the end wind up more flexible then either generated or cut and paste programming.
If you've got a code generator sitting around, then sure, go ahead and use it. But I cannot think of any case in an object-oriented language where it would be both less work and more maintainable to write a code generator than to just abstract away the parts that would be autogenerated..
Probably Darl is just going to pretend this didn't happen, not say a word about it, and hope that the mindless frenzy of stockbuyers don't even notice it happened because it was a news article in german instead of a press release in english.
And the stockbuyers probably *won't* notice. In fact, SCO's stock price for today is up *already*. Sigh..
you could also just download the free patch that fixed it a month before...
I think the idea is that the product is going to be targetted at ISPs and people in similar situations.. you know, where the people controlling the network don't necessarily have control of the computers actually running on the network. What good is a patch if you can't get your users to install it cuz they're dumb?
This is beautiful. Make it clearer, though, that we're talking about use licenses/single purchase licenses, not source code copy licenses such as the GPL. You need to very clearly define what kinds of purchases this bill of rights applies to, or software manufacturers will wierdly try to define their products so they fall outside the bill of rights' scope.
I wonder what would happen if 40,000 slashdotters mailed a copy of this to their respective congressferrets?
The only thing I would add is to see if there's any reasonable way something can be done about the fact the BSA has made it a criminal act to own lots of software and have less than perfect archiving of license paperwork.. I don't think there's any way that could be done in a reasonable manner within this "bill of rights" though...
[Scene: SCO Group, Utah. Where a "coordinated DDOS" is just beginning..]
[SUIT 1] Uh, hey, uh.. this one computer here.. it's like the webserver or something? [SUIT 2] Yeah, I think, why? [SUIT 1] Well, none of the lights on it are on.. that's.. hm. [SUIT 2] Oh, yeah, hey, look at that, someone seems to have tripped over the cord and unplugged it. [[Switches it back on]] [SUIT 1] Huh.. um.. it doesn't seem to have started up all the way. It's saying something about "fsck" and asking for a password. What does that mean? [SUIT 2] Hm, not sure. [SUIT 1] Well.. could we get one of the linux guys to come and reboot it? Or something? [SUIT 2] Well, we fired all of the linux guys so that we could concentrate all our resources on the lawsuit. [SUIT 1] Uh.. shit! Well, I guess I better figure something out.. hmm [[ Two days later, after two days of phone calls, SUIT 1 finally finds an INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR who doesn't just laugh and hang up on him when he says he wants them to come fix a linux server. INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR starts the linux server up all the way and charges a great deal of money. "Coordinated DDOS" thus ends. ]]
The privilidge of controlling trade secrets is granted to businesses by acts of government legislatures.
The right of freedom of speech is innate, universal, and to inaliable to every member of the human race. It also happens to be among the rights that the architects of the government of the united states decided needed to be explicitly enumerated in the government's charter as something that government legislatures are explicitly reminded they are not allowed to impinge in their actions.
Innate human rights take precedence over government-granted privilidges. Always. And among the functions of the courts in the United States is the task of ensuring that, when a government legislature attempts to put into law a limit on a universal human right despite.having no right or authority to do so, the law which creates the limitation is declared invalid and removed from the body of law of the land. For the moment, the California Supreme Court has failed in their duty.
So slashdot doesn't want me to post this unless i have a higher actual-text-to-html ratio, so i have to add junk text at the end. Hey, If an echo filter adds echo, what does a lameness filter do?
The obvious observation as to why this is the most fucking ironic thing ever is that, well, the negative press against SCO is coming from an absolutely huge variety of different sources, and being driven by every single person that SCO has attacked and every single person driven to moral outrage by witnessing SCO's attacked (the entire open source/UNIX community and roughly the entire "computer-saavy" community, respectively).
The positive press for SCO is coming from one cause and one cause only: namely, when news outlets report on press releases SCO puts out. It is being driven by SCO alone. The ONLY other impetus for a pro-SCO story that we've seen in eight months was that time that Microsoft put out a press release stating they'd bought a SCOsource license.
Are you all familiar with the psychological and propaganda phenomenon of "projection"?
Somehow I don't mind this kind of megalomaniacal self-important delusion when it's coming from a company like SUSE that actually has a meaningful, usable, well-crafted, well-supported product that time and effort was put into.
Oh well. To me, Linux still means "Debian and Gentoo, and maybe someday I'll consider trying SUSE, but probably not." Redhat and Mandrake are dead to me. ^_^
Slashdot Mirror
Quick question. In a previous Dragon-related thread on slashdot someone claimed that it would not be possible to sell the Dragon internationally becuase it is based on patented technologies that the patent owners have chosen not to do anything with. For the Dragon chip, the Chinese government hand-waved those patents away, but outside of China those patents would still apply and the chip would not be possible to sell.
Is this accurate?
Also: What is Taiwan's stance on the Dragon?
Voles are part of the same subfamily as Lemmings, and there is practically no difference between the two groups...
Here's an idea.
Go stand at Toys R. Us, or Best Buy. Wait until someone seems to be about to buy an x-box.
Then tell them what you have just told us, that after you buy the x-box, it won't be your hardware, it will still belong to Microsoft. If they seem incredulous, explain to them exactly how and why this is the case.
See how many of them actually buy the x-box after that. I'd be curious.
After all, SOMEONE has to build the modchips.
I understand your point, now.
Why bother sending people to an Earth-crossing asteroid? And why bother with a lunar base?
Incremental steps?
Trying to do everything at once would be *stupid*. You want to take this one step at a time. Sending people to an asteroid, or building a base on the moon, will teach us valuable lessons that will be directly applicable to going to mars. If there turns out to be something dramatically problematic about our initial base-on-other-celestial-bodies technology, we want to find out about this EARLY, and we want to find out about this on the moon, where we sort of have the ability to rescue and recover, not when the astronauts are a hundred gigameters away and we've spent months getting them there. If we're going to be building craft that can go a longish way away and interact with a body that isn't simply orbiting around the earth, we want to visit something slightly closer than mars first to work out the kinks in our technology.
Remember, Kennedy's "the moon in 10 years" speech was in 1961. The apollo program didn't begin until 1967. Would you argue that they were wasting time with their intermediate steps in Mercury and Gemini, doing things such as building multiperson spacecraft and sending them into space just to have them come right back again? After all, the goal wasn't always necessarily any science or anything useful, it was sometimes just to do it for its own sake, to see how hard it was.
While I do agree it's a reasonable worry that they'll begin this plan and then not commit the money later on... other than forcing congress into commitment (and they've committed $250million over two years for this plan, if it passes), all your concerns are actually addressed *in the bill*. We need an infrastructure in orbit around Earth before we can start sending things to the moon. ... the bill seems to actually *provide milestones specifically to set that infrastructure up*.
Larger space stations,
From the bill: "(20) Completion of the International Space Station with a full crew complement of 7 astronauts and robust research capabilities is essential if the United States is to carry out successfully a comprehensive initiative of scientific exploration of the solar system that involves human space flight.". No milestones are mandated in the bill for space stations, but this and other language in the bill would seem to imply that building additional space station facilities as needed are by the bill deemed necessary to fill out the bill's milestones.
orbital manufacturing,
From the bill: "(1) Within 8 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the development and flight demonstration of a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from low Earth orbit to the L 1 and L 2 Earth-Sun libration points and back for the purposes of assembling large-scale space structures such as would be required for scientific observatories, to the Earth-Moon libration points and back, and to lunar orbit and back."
and perhaps craft designed solely for use in space, to ship people and material to the moon.
Between 10 and 20 years from now, the bill would require: "the development and flight demonstration" of "a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from low Earth orbit to and from an Earth-orbit crossing asteroid and rendezvousing with it."; "a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon and back"; and "a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from low Earth orbit to and from Martian orbit".
What, exactly, is it about this bill that you find unrealistic, then? Do you believe there are steps missing that would have to happen, but would not happen unless specifically mandated in the bill? Do you believe that $250 million over the first two years is not enough? Fears that in 5 years the budget for this timeline will be lost is a very bad reason *never* to *try* the timeline.
Should resale of iTunes songs hurt their business, they can crack down without appearing to be hypocrites. "after further research it appears to be illegal".
Either that, or their response means "This sounds legal and acceptable to us, but we aren't going to come right out and say that, because we're afraid later that Universal will decide they don't think it should be legal and sue us for explitly and publicly giving consumers permission to exercise their right of first sale."
Or it means "I, Peter Lowe, am a marketing director, and so I can make public statements to the press, but I can't actually definitively say the resale thing is legal because saying that publicly would be basically setting policy, and I don't have the authority to set policy, and neither Apple Legal nor the people in charge of that have taken time to make a decision on this yet."
Or all three.
This is a standard idiom in english.
As for your examples of 'extreme examples', they are already used all over the place. Here, look. "Knife Death".. "Pool Death".. "Sea Death".. "Choking Death". Hey, look at that, the I'm Feeling Lucky for all four of those leads to a news article where the term is used in the headline. (Well, one is "Candy Choking Death".)
It was a death by way of a gun. It was a gun death. There's nothing anti-gun or newspeak about that it's just.. like.. an idiom.
Yeah, I used preview, but it's late and i'm tired..
:) My reference is here..
Where I said "The Gamecube outsold the PS2 last week".. that is a typo. What it should have said is "The Gamecube outsold the PS2 last week IN JAPAN". This is still a very significant event, but not quite so much so as my typo'd version implied.
This is a standard gambit. People do it to Apple all the time. Your company is doing poorly, so you write off a section of your company and use it to make you seem important. This announcement has two purposes. The first is that it lets them retreat out of the GameCube market and make it seem like Nintendo's fault, not theirs-- the media reports it as "*Nintendo is dying" not "Eidos has failed to make any compelling gamecube titles". (The truth would be somewhere in between, along the lines of "The games Eidos has been releasing for Gamecube are not enough to justify the expense of training and porting to the Gamecube." But that isn't going to get reported in any case, because it isn't very sensationalistic.) The second purpose is it makes Eidos seem important. Your gut reaction on hearing this article is something like "Wow, if companies as significant as Eidos are abandoning the GC, Nintendo must be in trouble." This thought comes automatically enough you don't stop to think, wait a minute, Eidos isn't particularly one of the significant companies right now.
Saying the Gamecube is dying is rediculous. It isn't number one and isn't going to be there probably ever. But it's doing very, *very* far from poorly. There have been a number of times over the GC's life cycle that it has been fair to say "OK, nintendo is in trouble", but this is definitely not one of them. This is the one of the GOOD spots. Nintendo is making *profits* on the GC, which is certainly more than Microsoft can say. The Gamecube outsold the PS2 last week. And the Gamecube is entering one of its best bits of game library in a LONG time. After a long, long summer of drought among GC games, with nothing of note being released but MegaMan, we just got F-Zero and (yes, cross-platform) Soul Calibur 2 released last week. Coming next month is Kirby's Air Ride, TMNT, XIII, that wierd sega Billy Hatcher thing, and Viewtiful Joe. At least two of these October games look to be legitimate blockbusters. The month after that Super Mario Kart is coming out, and that's one of Nintendo's most successful titles. That's an IMPRESSIVE crop of games, and when that crop of games grows totally old, it will be about March, which is when Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Pikmin 2 are released. I'm not going to say anything as to how this stacks up to how PS2/xbox are doing at the moment because I'm not qualified to comment on that, but one thing is certain: This is *NOT* a moment of "decline" of any sort for the Gamecube and Eidos' statement its a closing-down market is just silly.
And even if this weren't the case and the GC weren't succeeding on its own merits, the GBA looks to be making enough money and kicking enough ass that Nintendo could prop up a failing GC unit for about as long as Microsoft would bother to prop up a failing xbox unit..
Either way, Eidos leaving makes VERY little difference. I'm sure they make great stuff for other platforms, and I really liked the first two (first two) tomb raider games. But Eidos on the Gamecube? Hell, I can't even name you *ONE* game they made for the GC. Was that "timesplitters" thing theirs? Whatever it is they've been releasing for the GC, it hasn't been exceptional enough or marketed well enough to stay in my memory.. If my single data point is indicative of GC owners in general, that might have to do with why they aren't making any money on the GC.
The generator should be part of the build cycle. If you want to change the generated code snippet, change the generator!
:)
See, now this I agree with heartily and I think it's a really neat idea. I'm not quite sure I'd do it, but it's certainly a viable strategy. I wish there were a term to separate that from the sort of code generation that seems to be being discussed in the article here and linked. One is generating code and then using it, the other is something akin almost more to defining your own programming language.. I don't know. While the only difference between the two types of code generation is when the generation happens, I really kind of see them as two quite different approaches, one of which is a good idea, one of which is a bad idea..
Anyhow.. yeah. Something.
But I think I'm going to continue the plan i've been following for awhile of buying almost exclusively from independent/foreign labels anyway, just becuase I like the music better. My friends have been telling me the new albums by the Rapture and the Postal Service are really good..
Okay, maybe I'll get that evanescence album eventually. But by and large my RIAA purchases have fallen to nearly nil over the last couple years. And I'm not even trying. If I felt like it I could move into active boycott mode without feeling I'm missing anything from my life. I'm not quite there yet, but either way, I for one am not going to be buying any more Universal albums than before just because in general they don't have the stuff I'm interested in anymore..
Code Generation is for people who don't understand or are too lazy for abstraction, and it will ALWAYS have the problem of, what if you want to go through all your projects and change one single thing about the generated part of your code? What if you have a hundred tiny projects, each of which contains the generated code snippet that needs to be changed? Let's hope either the change you want to make is very simple or you are very good at regular expressions.
If you are able to clearly separate your code into "You can edit here" and "You cannot edit here" chunks, you can DEFINITELY seperate your code clearly into local chunks and delegated chunks-- i.e., "you cannot edit here" means you just do stuff, "you can edit here" means you talk to a delegate object or method. If EJBs are so frigging complicated that you have to do a bunch of repetitive grunt work that's the same every time you do it, you should somehow be building a slightly higher-level abstraction off of the things you do in common on each EJB and working from there. If EJB does not make this possible you should perhaps not be using EJB. There's always some way to do these things through abstraction, and it will ALWAYS in the end wind up more flexible then either generated or cut and paste programming.
If you've got a code generator sitting around, then sure, go ahead and use it. But I cannot think of any case in an object-oriented language where it would be both less work and more maintainable to write a code generator than to just abstract away the parts that would be autogenerated..
Probably Darl is just going to pretend this didn't happen, not say a word about it, and hope that the mindless frenzy of stockbuyers don't even notice it happened because it was a news article in german instead of a press release in english.
And the stockbuyers probably *won't* notice. In fact, SCO's stock price for today is up *already*. Sigh..
you could also just download the free patch that fixed it a month before...
I think the idea is that the product is going to be targetted at ISPs and people in similar situations.. you know, where the people controlling the network don't necessarily have control of the computers actually running on the network. What good is a patch if you can't get your users to install it cuz they're dumb?
This is beautiful. Make it clearer, though, that we're talking about use licenses/single purchase licenses, not source code copy licenses such as the GPL. You need to very clearly define what kinds of purchases this bill of rights applies to, or software manufacturers will wierdly try to define their products so they fall outside the bill of rights' scope.
I wonder what would happen if 40,000 slashdotters mailed a copy of this to their respective congressferrets?
The only thing I would add is to see if there's any reasonable way something can be done about the fact the BSA has made it a criminal act to own lots of software and have less than perfect archiving of license paperwork.. I don't think there's any way that could be done in a reasonable manner within this "bill of rights" though...
I think this is just a simple case of the left hand not knowing whose mouth the right foot is in.
[Scene: SCO Group, Utah. Where a "coordinated DDOS" is just beginning..]
[SUIT 1] Uh, hey, uh.. this one computer here.. it's like the webserver or something?
[SUIT 2] Yeah, I think, why?
[SUIT 1] Well, none of the lights on it are on.. that's.. hm.
[SUIT 2] Oh, yeah, hey, look at that, someone seems to have tripped over the cord and unplugged it. [[Switches it back on]]
[SUIT 1] Huh.. um.. it doesn't seem to have started up all the way. It's saying something about "fsck" and asking for a password. What does that mean?
[SUIT 2] Hm, not sure.
[SUIT 1] Well.. could we get one of the linux guys to come and reboot it? Or something?
[SUIT 2] Well, we fired all of the linux guys so that we could concentrate all our resources on the lawsuit.
[SUIT 1] Uh.. shit! Well, I guess I better figure something out.. hmm
[[ Two days later, after two days of phone calls, SUIT 1 finally finds an INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR who doesn't just laugh and hang up on him when he says he wants them to come fix a linux server. INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR starts the linux server up all the way and charges a great deal of money. "Coordinated DDOS" thus ends. ]]
At least in India/Russia they have the freedom to post security related software without going to jail...
In America, Soviet Russia makes jokes about YOUR lack of rights!
Trade secret controls are a privilegde.
Free speech is a right.
The privilidge of controlling trade secrets is granted to businesses by acts of government legislatures.
The right of freedom of speech is innate, universal, and to inaliable to every member of the human race. It also happens to be among the rights that the architects of the government of the united states decided needed to be explicitly enumerated in the government's charter as something that government legislatures are explicitly reminded they are not allowed to impinge in their actions.
Innate human rights take precedence over government-granted privilidges. Always. And among the functions of the courts in the United States is the task of ensuring that, when a government legislature attempts to put into law a limit on a universal human right despite.having no right or authority to do so, the law which creates the limitation is declared invalid and removed from the body of law of the land. For the moment, the California Supreme Court has failed in their duty.
This rant brought to you by Captain Obvious(TM)
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So slashdot doesn't want me to post this unless i have a higher actual-text-to-html ratio, so i have to add junk text at the end. Hey, If an echo filter adds echo, what does a lameness filter do?It's like, let's take the two package management systems I hate the MOST and combine them.
Uggh..
The obvious observation as to why this is the most fucking ironic thing ever is that, well, the negative press against SCO is coming from an absolutely huge variety of different sources, and being driven by every single person that SCO has attacked and every single person driven to moral outrage by witnessing SCO's attacked (the entire open source/UNIX community and roughly the entire "computer-saavy" community, respectively).
The positive press for SCO is coming from one cause and one cause only: namely, when news outlets report on press releases SCO puts out. It is being driven by SCO alone. The ONLY other impetus for a pro-SCO story that we've seen in eight months was that time that Microsoft put out a press release stating they'd bought a SCOsource license.
Are you all familiar with the psychological and propaganda phenomenon of "projection"?
Somehow I don't mind this kind of megalomaniacal self-important delusion when it's coming from a company like SUSE that actually has a meaningful, usable, well-crafted, well-supported product that time and effort was put into.
Oh well. To me, Linux still means "Debian and Gentoo, and maybe someday I'll consider trying SUSE, but probably not." Redhat and Mandrake are dead to me. ^_^