I can't believe that these congressmen don't feel the same way as 99.9999999999999999% of the american public do about this. Maybe it's because they've been living under a rock for their entire term and they don't know that the rest of the country is under attack from these marketing monkeys.
It's probably because, as Congressmen, they have interns reading their e-mail for them..
If a science fiction movie has to name a computer program which simulates every part of life, its called "The Matrix".
This isn't totally unreasonable. The following is from the 1913 Webster's Dictionary; note entries 1 and 2. They seem to describe "The Matrix" from the sci-fi movie you mention perfectly.
Ma"trix (?), n.; pl. Matrices (#). [L., fr. mater mother. See Mother, and cf. Matrice.]
1. Anat.
The womb.
All that openeth the matrix is mine. Ex. xxxiv. 19.
2.
Hence, that which gives form or origin to anything ; as: (a) Mech. The cavity in which anything is formed, and which gives it shape; a die; a mold, as for the face of a type.
(b) Min. The earthy or stony substance in which metallic ores or crystallized minerals are found; the gangue.
(c) pl. Dyeing. The five simple colors, black, white, blue, red, and yellow, of which all the rest are composed.
3. Biol.
The lifeless portion of tissue, either animal or vegetable, situated between the cells; the intercellular substance.
4. Math.
A rectangular arrangement of symbols in rows and columns. The symbols may express quantities or operations.
Umm.. maybe i'm just out of it, but where does it say that? I don't see any mention of that in the article.
If you're referring to Classic/MacOS9, Apple has been phasing that out steadily for something like three or five years now, and has been VERY clear for longer than that that Classic is going away. This was done for very good technical reasons, and had absolutely *nothing* to do with Adobe. EVERYONE in the entire mac industry has had to move off the OS9 APIs and into the Carbon/Cocoa APIs. Including Adobe, with every other product besides Premiere. Moreover, Apple provided a very clear upgrade path and lots of tools and documentation to port things from Classic to the Carbon API.
What I don't get is why it is that when this came up, and when the whole IE thing came up, people seem to occationally somehow think it's harder to compete against Apple than against a different third-party.
Why?
I don't see what Apple's advantage is. All of their apps have gone through public, well-documented (okay, and in some cases not-so-well-documented, but they're working on that) APIs; there's nothing hidden. There have even been a couple cases where widgets and classes used in iApps have been later migrated into the main Cocoa API (like the itunes search system or "that switcher thing") because apple thought they might be useful to developers. The only real advantage Apple's had is that they've taken advantage of new APIs immediately, whereas other companies don't like saying "you have to upgrade to Panther to use this app". I went to the WWDC, and it really seems like Apple hasn't done anything anyone could have done; in fact, they actually had one session where they used Safari as a case study, showing how they used performance testing tools in making Safari so other people could do the same.
Don't say it's because Apple can use the money from their OS/computer business to unfairly finance other things; Apple is clearly understaffed and Adobe probably has more loose change than Apple. And I seriously doubt it's becuase of the expertise and access to engineers that comes from being in the same building as the Quicktime engineers. If Adobe's support contract didn't give it roughly the same degree of access, they would be able to bitch and moan about that specific problem and there would be a big community backlash.. there's worry already about apple's new presence in the applications area and a perception that apple is giving its own engineers preferential treatment could hurt them kind of badly.
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive-- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program."
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Some things just aren't meant to be used by the blind.
Yes, but that set of things would not logically include Hotmail, Yahoo! Instant Messaging, and Verisign's registration database, which are the specific websites that are listed in this article as using image-based anti-bot techniques...
What that case seems to say is that not only can genes be patented, but that farmers are infringing on the patent if they grow plants containing a patented gene without having a patent license-- no matter whether the seeds actually came from monsato or were produced naturally by the resulting plants. The farmer in that specific case wasn't even taking-- pollen containing the Monsato Roundup Ready blew onto his field against his will, and as a result of that a judge decided Monsato owned all the contaminated wheat and the farmer owed license fees. I don't see how that is a "process".
So, to drag out and beat he proveribal Slashdot Glowing Dead horse..
I assume these glowing genes are patented by somebody?
Does this mean that if you buy these fish, breeding them will be illegal?
Do you think that once, rather than this just being something that affects farmers (in faraway states) and computer programmers (who the average person has to learn an entire new vocabulary just to understand what the programmers are talking about), once the whole you-can-patent-anything thing starts to affect "the average person" in a very clear, noticeable way-- "Here are some dogs, that you paid money for. But you're banned from letting them breed, because they happen to contain some invisible series of DNA codes that, despite being part of this dog's very life, is the intellectual property of some random corporation."-- do you think once we reach that point, maybe we'll finally start to see public backlash against how far the u.s. patent paradigm has gone?
Of course, if the people selling these fish want to keep their patents safe, they'd probably just make all the fish infertile. But then if all the fish are infertile, why are the environmentalists worried? Is it because they've seen "Jurassic park"? And what happens if some of the un-neutered versions somehow leak out on the black market (ebay)? Could they stop that? Is spaying a DMCA-applicable "method that effectively controls access to intellectual property"?
O'Reily's Msql and Mysql
on
Linux Clustering
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Uh.. what was wrong with MySQL and msql? I mean, it wasn't the most incredibly intensely mind-opening technical book i've ever read, but it wasn't useless, either. Far as i could tell the first couple chapters introduced you to SQL pretty well (which isn't exactly difficult, but they didn't really flub it), which you would never read more than once, and the rest was just various bits of random somewhat-disorganized reference material, sample sql, and sample database code in a few languages. It wasn't really any more useful than it would have been to have a printed and bound book that just contained the mysql manual, the dbi perldoc, and the manpage for the c database library.. and now that i'm used to mysql i just use the online manual.. and i will probably never dig my copy of the book out of the bottom of my closet never again.. but i don't really think i'm -sorry- i bought it.
And of course, it's been a long time since i first read the book, but i don't remember it being unpleasant. Why all the disdain?
Your anology is good. I will now stretch it to the point of being silly.
There are studies-- ones i can't remember the names of or links to, of course-- that show that spanking a child makes that child more likely to grow up to be a violent person. If I remember right, the claim was that people who had corporal punishment used on them as a child were more likely to grow up to be the kind of person who beat their wives or children.
The reason given for this, again if i remember right, was that by having violence used on them at such a sensitive age, the child grows up thinking violence is "normal", and application of violence is how you are expected to solve problems, and beating someone is an acceptable and normal way for one human to get another human to comply with a request.
So, here's my thought: what happens if the RIAA hacking and screwing up your computer if you've been filetrading becomes common? What happens to the children/teenagers who grow up under this kind of paradigm, and grow up seeing that the RIAA, this big important adult business thing that funds congressional campaigns and everything, reacts to people doing things it things are wrong by tracking them down and breaking their stuff?
If it works like spanking does, well, we may well wind up with a generation growing up thinking vigilante justice is normal. Or maybe growing up with a kind of "us vs them" mentality toward corporations; that corporations are some kind of big distant enemies who can do anything they like without the law applying. And you can't tell a kid that someone big is allowed to hit you and you can't hit back and have them believe you. They might wind up growing up thinking that terrorism by corporations against citizens, and terrorism against corporations by citizens, is normal, and the law considers such things acceptable enough they don't regulate them.. as long as one is doing the other doesn't like...
This is stretching, and of course, none of this will ever come to pass. But, just a thought.
...Orrin Hatch gets his way, and this legislation is passed, and this technology is implemented (though i've no idea how they'd expect it to work..)...and someone who happens to be a copyright owner, maybe someone like Ani Difranco, i don't know, who just happens to hate Orrin Hatch, proceeds to remotely destroy Orrin Hatch's personal computer and those used by his election campaign?
Orrin Hatch says, what is this? Ani or whoever claims that those computers were downloading mp3s of her music illegally over KaZaa, which at this point can be neither proven nor disproven because the computers are broken. Orrin says I wasn't stealing any music, Ani says hmm, it might have been your grandchildren and/or interns, you really should be a better parent/boss...
Ohh, the howling that would commence. But, of course, this is just what happens when you implement methods of law that don't have due process attached to them. It scares me that anyone could become a senator without realizing that...
I assume that just because it's illegal doesn't mean it won't happen. Especially if it's fuzzy and hard to prove as insider trading is.
The thing that scares me about this case is that while it's blatantly obvious to the 'average slashdotter' this case is nonsense, it may not be so obvious to someone without a good grasp of the UNIX history and technology. There may be fallout for most of the board if it turns out SCO is engaging in outright fraud-- trying to sue based on BSD code in linux, perhaps-- but if it's something fuzzier, and it becomes clear SCO's claims are baseless and there's a countersuit but they didn't do anything blatantly "wrong",the former SCO executives could make a case they honestly thought they were doing what they thought was best for shareholders, despite this being nonsense.
The crux of the matter is that SCO's smokescreen-- if you'll notice, they've managed to skew the media coverage of the matter such that it seems to change from story to story exactly *why* SCO is suing-- means that anyone's memories of this, including normally smart board members looking for a new CEO, will be INCREDIBLY fuzzy, and SOmay succeed in making what happened here seem kind of ambiguous after the fact, even despite it potentially not being very ambiguous at all.
According to logic, this gives us all things that are Unix and are not Unix is one package. Therefore, all things in the universe are now a part of Unix, and open source.
Young Nerd: What is UNIX?
Old Nerd: Unfortunately, no one can be told what UNIX is... They have to see it for themselves.
According to this page, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corp., attained the rank of Life in the Boy Scouts.
According to this page, William H. Gates, Bill Gates' father and the "William Gates" relevant to the Preston-Gates law firm linked in the slashblurb (note that said lawfirm is now slashdotted), is an Eagle Scout and served as a board member on the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America from 1985 to 1990.
And in other news, LucasArts, the electronic entertainment company founded by George Lucas of Star Wars fame and famous for their adventure games based on the SCUMM engine, have sued SCO for trademark infringement for a billion dollars..
______ Like any public domain or copyleft project, it doesn't really matter what kind of job the maintainer does with the Jargon File, since alternate versions may be created effortlessly. ESR should be free to do whatever he likes with the thing, even if it's a bit silly. And since ESR isn't bothering anymore to host the definitive version himself, and hasn't for like a year or something, and 90% of the jargon file mirrors found on google are old versions anyway, it isn't like a forking would even be noticed.
I read the article after writing this comment and noticed NTK kind of makes this point themselves, but I think it's worth reiterating. Esp. since no one reads the article around here.
That was supposed to be a joking reference to LCD, a webcomic based around the newsroom of WLCD, a fictional television station somewhere in Oklahoma (though probably not Frederick). Unfortunately the best parts of the strip's archive disappeared during the massive keenspace crash a couple months ago, and the strip no longer updates..
You're right about the W/K thing, as far as i'm aware. I don't know why the strip's station is named that.
I'm sure that "homeland america" will be reeeal okay with that. You know, those places where radio signals travel a decent distance, but no one wants to dig 4000 feet of cable to get to your house. Yeah, almost everyone out there has satellite. However, not everyone wants to pay a monthly fee to watch TV, and more importantly, the middle of nowhere are the areas most likely to want some kind of highly localized tv channel. You think that a satellite provider is going to carry WLCD, Frederick, Oklahoma? No. And *no one* in that part of Oklahoma, practically, has cable. This means if you cut out the broadcast spectrum, this area can no longer have local channels of their own.
I'm also sure that there will be bad consequences from the fact that using exclusively satellite/cable means that in many area, cable would be *it*. There would be a couple people willing to go with satellite, but satellite has some inherent problems in it and these would likely continue, as they have been, to be a minority.
These are privately held and privately controlled networks. I don't exactly trust or like the FCC, but at least they have SOME accountability to the public. AOLTW has none.
Realize that *MANY* areas have a literal monopoly, locally, on cable. Realize that this means we'd be removing the monopoly on who determines who gets a television license out of the hands of the FCC and putting it in the hands of an unaccountable, private, local monopoly. Don't like the fact that AOLTW Cable doesn't carry X Channel You Like? Want to start a public access public service station that at one time the FCC would have greenlighted, but AOLTW cable isn't interested in handing bandwidth to because it's not a money maker and they'd rather go with Animal Planet 2? Get reeeal used to it. And once everyone else gets "used to" this, get very used to any and all complaints being met with "hey, you have choice. if you don't like it you can always move".
I think here on/., we are all denying it like crazy and ludicrously thinking that SCO is suing for *no* reason. Why would a company sue unless it has at least something to base its case on?
I think most of slashdot is holding that belief for two reasons:
The assumption that if SCO had a valid reason to sue, they'd come out and say what it was, rather than saying "there's some infringing code, but we won't tell you what it is" or "there's some infringing patents, but we won't tell you what they are".
The assumption that if SCO had a valid reason to sue, they'd *know what it is*. From the beginning of all of this, SCO has vacillitated, vaguely swapped everything, and basically been incapable of keeping their story straight for any length of time. SCO's actions have come across as a liar making increasingly grandiose claims each time that it appears people are beginning to doubt them-- complaining about patents, then when people begin pointing out that isn't a very valid reason due to clauses in the GPL, suddenly going "uh there was some source code too.. yeah! source code! lots and lots of source code, hundreds of lines, all over the place! and ESR, yeah, he is SO pro-stealing, have you ever looked at him? yeah.". Things like that. The lack of consistency begins to look like the kind of desperate flailing intrinsic in someone who wants to sue and is just looking for an excuse.
Whether these assumptions are valid are up to you. Personally I do think you have a pointt the linux community should at least recognize the possibility that SCO's claims are valid and try to make an emphasis in the public eye that if there is infringing code in linux it will be replaced immediately-- but that doesn't mean is worth it to take SCO seriously unless they can actually tell some fricking evidence to the public. How long has this public "yeah linux is doing BAD ILLEGAL THINGS, no we can't tell you what they are" nonsense been going on exactly?
My thought on all this is that that won't be known until such time as the code in question is actually released. At which point the Linux kernel admins will look at their records, hunt down the people who submitted those patches, and *ask them*, and probably call them as witnesses.
At this point things will probably get interesting, as there are open, public records that show bit by bit in pretty close detail every step of the development of the linux kernel, and who submitted what, and when, and why it was accepted-- and these records have been publicly available on the internet for years, and archives exist in various places, which would make these records impossible to change after the fact. SCO, meanwhile, if they have records at all of when and by who code was added to their materials, has no particular proof that those records are real and not faked (either by their lawyers or a malicious employee years previous trying to pass off open source code as his own work). Just a thought..
Of course had SCO simply begun all this by publicly saying "hey, these parts of the linux kernel are copied from code we own the copyright to", the linux kernel admins would have just about certainly simply checked out those sections of code and the people who wrote them, and, if there was an apparent infringement, removed and replaced the offending sections. I'm really really hoping that this fact will not escape the judge at trial.
(I'm assuming the linux kernel people wouldn't do something stupid like allow an anonymous patch into the kernel.)
now that you mention it [netcraft]
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
And what if you listen to music in a job or school environment where-- perhaps because you are in a computer lab or something-- you are probably using a different computer every day?
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe that these congressmen don't feel the same way as 99.9999999999999999% of the american public do about this. Maybe it's because they've been living under a rock for their entire term and they don't know that the rest of the country is under attack from these marketing monkeys.
It's probably because, as Congressmen, they have interns reading their e-mail for them..
This isn't totally unreasonable. The following is from the 1913 Webster's Dictionary; note entries 1 and 2. They seem to describe "The Matrix" from the sci-fi movie you mention perfectly.
Umm.. maybe i'm just out of it, but where does it say that? I don't see any mention of that in the article.
If you're referring to Classic/MacOS9, Apple has been phasing that out steadily for something like three or five years now, and has been VERY clear for longer than that that Classic is going away. This was done for very good technical reasons, and had absolutely *nothing* to do with Adobe. EVERYONE in the entire mac industry has had to move off the OS9 APIs and into the Carbon/Cocoa APIs. Including Adobe, with every other product besides Premiere. Moreover, Apple provided a very clear upgrade path and lots of tools and documentation to port things from Classic to the Carbon API.
I'm not sure if I understand what you are saying.
What I don't get is why it is that when this came up, and when the whole IE thing came up, people seem to occationally somehow think it's harder to compete against Apple than against a different third-party.
Why?
I don't see what Apple's advantage is. All of their apps have gone through public, well-documented (okay, and in some cases not-so-well-documented, but they're working on that) APIs; there's nothing hidden. There have even been a couple cases where widgets and classes used in iApps have been later migrated into the main Cocoa API (like the itunes search system or "that switcher thing") because apple thought they might be useful to developers. The only real advantage Apple's had is that they've taken advantage of new APIs immediately, whereas other companies don't like saying "you have to upgrade to Panther to use this app". I went to the WWDC, and it really seems like Apple hasn't done anything anyone could have done; in fact, they actually had one session where they used Safari as a case study, showing how they used performance testing tools in making Safari so other people could do the same.
Don't say it's because Apple can use the money from their OS/computer business to unfairly finance other things; Apple is clearly understaffed and Adobe probably has more loose change than Apple. And I seriously doubt it's becuase of the expertise and access to engineers that comes from being in the same building as the Quicktime engineers. If Adobe's support contract didn't give it roughly the same degree of access, they would be able to bitch and moan about that specific problem and there would be a big community backlash.. there's worry already about apple's new presence in the applications area and a perception that apple is giving its own engineers preferential treatment could hurt them kind of badly.
Some things just aren't meant to be used by the blind.
Yes, but that set of things would not logically include Hotmail, Yahoo! Instant Messaging, and Verisign's registration database, which are the specific websites that are listed in this article as using image-based anti-bot techniques...
You can patent a process / technique, but you can't just patent arbitrary bits of information (like the "glowing" genes).
Then what's up with this?
What that case seems to say is that not only can genes be patented, but that farmers are infringing on the patent if they grow plants containing a patented gene without having a patent license-- no matter whether the seeds actually came from monsato or were produced naturally by the resulting plants. The farmer in that specific case wasn't even taking-- pollen containing the Monsato Roundup Ready blew onto his field against his will, and as a result of that a judge decided Monsato owned all the contaminated wheat and the farmer owed license fees. I don't see how that is a "process".
So, to drag out and beat he proveribal Slashdot Glowing Dead horse..
I assume these glowing genes are patented by somebody?
Does this mean that if you buy these fish, breeding them will be illegal?
Do you think that once, rather than this just being something that affects farmers (in faraway states) and computer programmers (who the average person has to learn an entire new vocabulary just to understand what the programmers are talking about), once the whole you-can-patent-anything thing starts to affect "the average person" in a very clear, noticeable way-- "Here are some dogs, that you paid money for. But you're banned from letting them breed, because they happen to contain some invisible series of DNA codes that, despite being part of this dog's very life, is the intellectual property of some random corporation."-- do you think once we reach that point, maybe we'll finally start to see public backlash against how far the u.s. patent paradigm has gone?
Of course, if the people selling these fish want to keep their patents safe, they'd probably just make all the fish infertile. But then if all the fish are infertile, why are the environmentalists worried? Is it because they've seen "Jurassic park"? And what happens if some of the un-neutered versions somehow leak out on the black market (ebay)? Could they stop that? Is spaying a DMCA-applicable "method that effectively controls access to intellectual property"?
Uh.. what was wrong with MySQL and msql? I mean, it wasn't the most incredibly intensely mind-opening technical book i've ever read, but it wasn't useless, either. Far as i could tell the first couple chapters introduced you to SQL pretty well (which isn't exactly difficult, but they didn't really flub it), which you would never read more than once, and the rest was just various bits of random somewhat-disorganized reference material, sample sql, and sample database code in a few languages. It wasn't really any more useful than it would have been to have a printed and bound book that just contained the mysql manual, the dbi perldoc, and the manpage for the c database library.. and now that i'm used to mysql i just use the online manual.. and i will probably never dig my copy of the book out of the bottom of my closet never again.. but i don't really think i'm -sorry- i bought it.
And of course, it's been a long time since i first read the book, but i don't remember it being unpleasant. Why all the disdain?
Your anology is good. I will now stretch it to the point of being silly.
There are studies-- ones i can't remember the names of or links to, of course-- that show that spanking a child makes that child more likely to grow up to be a violent person. If I remember right, the claim was that people who had corporal punishment used on them as a child were more likely to grow up to be the kind of person who beat their wives or children.
The reason given for this, again if i remember right, was that by having violence used on them at such a sensitive age, the child grows up thinking violence is "normal", and application of violence is how you are expected to solve problems, and beating someone is an acceptable and normal way for one human to get another human to comply with a request.
So, here's my thought: what happens if the RIAA hacking and screwing up your computer if you've been filetrading becomes common? What happens to the children/teenagers who grow up under this kind of paradigm, and grow up seeing that the RIAA, this big important adult business thing that funds congressional campaigns and everything, reacts to people doing things it things are wrong by tracking them down and breaking their stuff?
If it works like spanking does, well, we may well wind up with a generation growing up thinking vigilante justice is normal. Or maybe growing up with a kind of "us vs them" mentality toward corporations; that corporations are some kind of big distant enemies who can do anything they like without the law applying. And you can't tell a kid that someone big is allowed to hit you and you can't hit back and have them believe you. They might wind up growing up thinking that terrorism by corporations against citizens, and terrorism against corporations by citizens, is normal, and the law considers such things acceptable enough they don't regulate them.. as long as one is doing the other doesn't like...
This is stretching, and of course, none of this will ever come to pass. But, just a thought.
...Orrin Hatch gets his way, and this legislation is passed, and this technology is implemented (though i've no idea how they'd expect it to work..) ...and someone who happens to be a copyright owner, maybe someone like Ani Difranco, i don't know, who just happens to hate Orrin Hatch, proceeds to remotely destroy Orrin Hatch's personal computer and those used by his election campaign?
Orrin Hatch says, what is this? Ani or whoever claims that those computers were downloading mp3s of her music illegally over KaZaa, which at this point can be neither proven nor disproven because the computers are broken. Orrin says I wasn't stealing any music, Ani says hmm, it might have been your grandchildren and/or interns, you really should be a better parent/boss...
Ohh, the howling that would commence. But, of course, this is just what happens when you implement methods of law that don't have due process attached to them. It scares me that anyone could become a senator without realizing that...
I assume that just because it's illegal doesn't mean it won't happen. Especially if it's fuzzy and hard to prove as insider trading is.
The thing that scares me about this case is that while it's blatantly obvious to the 'average slashdotter' this case is nonsense, it may not be so obvious to someone without a good grasp of the UNIX history and technology. There may be fallout for most of the board if it turns out SCO is engaging in outright fraud-- trying to sue based on BSD code in linux, perhaps-- but if it's something fuzzier, and it becomes clear SCO's claims are baseless and there's a countersuit but they didn't do anything blatantly "wrong",the former SCO executives could make a case they honestly thought they were doing what they thought was best for shareholders, despite this being nonsense.
The crux of the matter is that SCO's smokescreen-- if you'll notice, they've managed to skew the media coverage of the matter such that it seems to change from story to story exactly *why* SCO is suing-- means that anyone's memories of this, including normally smart board members looking for a new CEO, will be INCREDIBLY fuzzy, and SOmay succeed in making what happened here seem kind of ambiguous after the fact, even despite it potentially not being very ambiguous at all.
echo echo echo echo
According to logic, this gives us all things that are Unix and are not Unix is one package. Therefore, all things in the universe are now a part of Unix, and open source.
Young Nerd: What is UNIX?
Old Nerd: Unfortunately, no one can be told what UNIX is... They have to see it for themselves.
According to this page, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corp., attained the rank of Life in the Boy Scouts.
According to this page, William H. Gates, Bill Gates' father and the "William Gates" relevant to the Preston-Gates law firm linked in the slashblurb (note that said lawfirm is now slashdotted), is an Eagle Scout and served as a board member on the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America from 1985 to 1990.
And in other news, LucasArts, the electronic entertainment company founded by George Lucas of Star Wars fame and famous for their adventure games based on the SCUMM engine, have sued SCO for trademark infringement for a billion dollars..
Fork.
______
Like any public domain or copyleft project, it doesn't really matter what kind of job the maintainer does with the Jargon File, since alternate versions may be created effortlessly. ESR should be free to do whatever he likes with the thing, even if it's a bit silly. And since ESR isn't bothering anymore to host the definitive version himself, and hasn't for like a year or something, and 90% of the jargon file mirrors found on google are old versions anyway, it isn't like a forking would even be noticed.
I read the article after writing this comment and noticed NTK kind of makes this point themselves, but I think it's worth reiterating. Esp. since no one reads the article around here.
That was supposed to be a joking reference to LCD, a webcomic based around the newsroom of WLCD, a fictional television station somewhere in Oklahoma (though probably not Frederick). Unfortunately the best parts of the strip's archive disappeared during the massive keenspace crash a couple months ago, and the strip no longer updates..
You're right about the W/K thing, as far as i'm aware. I don't know why the strip's station is named that.
Aha. That sounds a great deal more reasonable.
BTW, no, i didn't listen to the interview, i cannot do streaming audio where i am today. -_- So, thank you for filling me in.
I'm sure that "homeland america" will be reeeal okay with that. You know, those places where radio signals travel a decent distance, but no one wants to dig 4000 feet of cable to get to your house. Yeah, almost everyone out there has satellite. However, not everyone wants to pay a monthly fee to watch TV, and more importantly, the middle of nowhere are the areas most likely to want some kind of highly localized tv channel. You think that a satellite provider is going to carry WLCD, Frederick, Oklahoma? No. And *no one* in that part of Oklahoma, practically, has cable. This means if you cut out the broadcast spectrum, this area can no longer have local channels of their own.
I'm also sure that there will be bad consequences from the fact that using exclusively satellite/cable means that in many area, cable would be *it*. There would be a couple people willing to go with satellite, but satellite has some inherent problems in it and these would likely continue, as they have been, to be a minority.
These are privately held and privately controlled networks. I don't exactly trust or like the FCC, but at least they have SOME accountability to the public. AOLTW has none.
Realize that *MANY* areas have a literal monopoly, locally, on cable. Realize that this means we'd be removing the monopoly on who determines who gets a television license out of the hands of the FCC and putting it in the hands of an unaccountable, private, local monopoly. Don't like the fact that AOLTW Cable doesn't carry X Channel You Like? Want to start a public access public service station that at one time the FCC would have greenlighted, but AOLTW cable isn't interested in handing bandwidth to because it's not a money maker and they'd rather go with Animal Planet 2? Get reeeal used to it. And once everyone else gets "used to" this, get very used to any and all complaints being met with "hey, you have choice. if you don't like it you can always move".
Welcome to the new global Feudalism.
I think most of slashdot is holding that belief for two reasons:
- The assumption that if SCO had a valid reason to sue, they'd come out and say what it was, rather than saying "there's some infringing code, but we won't tell you what it is" or "there's some infringing patents, but we won't tell you what they are".
- The assumption that if SCO had a valid reason to sue, they'd *know what it is*. From the beginning of all of this, SCO has vacillitated, vaguely swapped everything, and basically been incapable of keeping their story straight for any length of time. SCO's actions have come across as a liar making increasingly grandiose claims each time that it appears people are beginning to doubt them-- complaining about patents, then when people begin pointing out that isn't a very valid reason due to clauses in the GPL, suddenly going "uh there was some source code too.. yeah! source code! lots and lots of source code, hundreds of lines, all over the place! and ESR, yeah, he is SO pro-stealing, have you ever looked at him? yeah.". Things like that. The lack of consistency begins to look like the kind of desperate flailing intrinsic in someone who wants to sue and is just looking for an excuse.
Whether these assumptions are valid are up to you. Personally I do think you have a pointt the linux community should at least recognize the possibility that SCO's claims are valid and try to make an emphasis in the public eye that if there is infringing code in linux it will be replaced immediately-- but that doesn't mean is worth it to take SCO seriously unless they can actually tell some fricking evidence to the public. How long has this public "yeah linux is doing BAD ILLEGAL THINGS, no we can't tell you what they are" nonsense been going on exactly?My thought on all this is that that won't be known until such time as the code in question is actually released. At which point the Linux kernel admins will look at their records, hunt down the people who submitted those patches, and *ask them*, and probably call them as witnesses.
At this point things will probably get interesting, as there are open, public records that show bit by bit in pretty close detail every step of the development of the linux kernel, and who submitted what, and when, and why it was accepted-- and these records have been publicly available on the internet for years, and archives exist in various places, which would make these records impossible to change after the fact. SCO, meanwhile, if they have records at all of when and by who code was added to their materials, has no particular proof that those records are real and not faked (either by their lawyers or a malicious employee years previous trying to pass off open source code as his own work). Just a thought..
Of course had SCO simply begun all this by publicly saying "hey, these parts of the linux kernel are copied from code we own the copyright to", the linux kernel admins would have just about certainly simply checked out those sections of code and the people who wrote them, and, if there was an apparent infringement, removed and replaced the offending sections. I'm really really hoping that this fact will not escape the judge at trial.
(I'm assuming the linux kernel people wouldn't do something stupid like allow an anonymous patch into the kernel.)
Netcraft's analyzer says:
Operating System and Web Server for www.sco.com
The site www.sco.com is running Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.0.3pl1 on Linux.
You can't stream protected files without authorizing the client machine
:)
Really? Huh. Well, I must just be really out of it then.
and wget
alias wget curl -O
Just add that to your cshrc file. When apple removed wget they put in "curl", and "curl -O" does the same thing as "wget".
And what if you listen to music in a job or school environment where-- perhaps because you are in a computer lab or something-- you are probably using a different computer every day?
Like me?
That begins to become extremely inconvenient.