Their review of Debian seemed awfully lost. It seems to me that they were comparing apples to oranges. If they had compared the VA/O'Reilly/SGI "boxed" version with Corel, Red Hat, and the others, it probably would have been a more favorable review, if only because the lack of printed documentation would no longer be a gripe.
And it doesn't have a "find next" keystroke, like "n" in less. And if you give a null search string, it doesn't understand to repeat the previous one. You have to type it in again and again. Very un-Unixy. Plus it often seems to do the wrong thing.
n works fine for me as "find next" in Lynx.
As someone else pointed out, w3m seems closer to what you want. It seems too much like the crappy TN3270-style "use the cursor keys and tab to move around the screen to fill in forms" to me, but I'll probably get used to it eventually. Plus I do like the way forms are handled in w3m (modally). I dunno about the regex-searching, though.
You might also like Emacs w3-mode, since it has similar controls to w3m (maybe w3m is supposed to be a w3-mode clone, hence the name... I've never made heads or tails of the Japanenglish man page).
I recommend anyone seriously interested (or even casually interested) in this topic check out Gattaca, an infinitely better exploration of this topic than this media rant. (Plus, it doesn't hurt that Uma Thurman is in it;-).)
(you don't want to have the sovejt union one of that time at all, do you?)
Actually, the Soviet Union had a fairly liberal constitution (as does the People's Republic of China). However, it (obviously) was not followed in practice.
MSIE lets you assign sites to "trusted" and "restricted" zones, which is better than Netscape, but a per-URL scheme would be much nicer. Probably too late to get it into the first release of Mozilla, though it'd be a nice add-on project.
Incidentally, I've found lynx's cookie handling fairly good; you at least have the site granularity, which is nice.
Would the Germans also ban software under the GPL written by Scientologists? I think it's a fairly safe bet that at least some GPLed code was written by one...
(This sounds like a non-tariff barrier, rather than a legitimate social concern. Unless the software is designed to convert people into Scientologists, or Nazis, or tree-huggers, I can't see any good reason to ban it.)
Somewhat off-topic: while bandwidth and TV are great equalizers, movies are about the only "modern" form of the media that people in rural areas don't have equal access to. I for one don't like having to drive 1.5 hrs to see a good movie in a decent environment (yet I can go and see crap like EoD at my local 4-screen, zero-comfort theater), in a college town no less. The decent movies rarely last more than a week, and since it's a four-screener you're lucky if any of them are R-rated (except slasher movies).
Don't get me wrong, I love my DVD player (but that's only good for seeing the best movies of 1998 and early 1999, courtesy of NetFlix). And I did make the trek for Dogma (twice) and American Beauty, both of which are excellent films. Not Egoyan or Sayles, but then again nobody's perfect (except maybe them, on occasion).
In the Memphis metro area, a new mall opened in February 1997 that was (at the time) one of the biggest in the country. Another is likely to open in the next two years about 3 miles south of the state line (either in Horn Lake or Southaven, Mississippi), that will be at least as big. Another megamall just opened about 30 miles west of Atlanta. All of these malls opened in areas where affluent people live and there is probably 60% internet penetration. Malls aren't dying, at least not in the aggregate.
Where malls will die is where retailers with online presences decide to choose between underperforming malls (i.e. >10 years old) and e-commerce. Some malls will lose out, but it won't be because e-commerce took their customers; instead, it'll be because e-commerce is more profitable than operating in a mall that's been left behind by urban growth.
The monopoly of violence comes from the basic historical theory of how political units originally came to pass. I can't give any great citations, but the basic outline is:
Man lives in a state of nature. He uses violence to protect his property.
Men join together to collectively ensure their security.
Some man becomes the ruler.
This man, to consolidate this position, decides that only he can permit the use of violence to settle disputes. At least, I'm pretty sure how this theory works. It may come from Hobbes' The Leviathan. I know Locke makes similar points.
Incidentally, I think the author has an interesting theory, and it would seem consistent with the government's actions with regard to crypto (which, after all, seeks a monopoly on the legitimate use of truly secure communications).
If anything, the power that the Canadian federal government has over itz citizens is more than that of its American counterpart.
I suspect that the Canadian federal government actually has less power over its citizens than the American one. Many perogatives that the US federal government has arrogated onto itself (particularly in the field of social insurance) are jealously guarded by Canadian provinces. Canada's federal government basically governs by carrot (big cash handouts to the provinces), whereas America's mostly governs by the stick. Granted, there are exceptions (the 21-year drinking age was nationalized in the US by tying it to federal transportation funding).
In any event, the RCMP hasn't taken to the practices of shooting pregnant women, leading assaults against non-traditional religious groups, and bursting into peoples' homes and killing elderly men for no reason, all in the supposed interest of protecting society from the evils of guns and drugs. I suspect if the RCMP behaved as our "law enforcement" authorities did, many more Canadians would be afraid of their government (and particularly of their efforts to disarm the populace, in order to further ensure the state's monopoly of violence).
Where are all those debian bigots badmouthing about RedHat's supposedly spamming them?
Those "debian bigots" (nice example of literacy there, bub) were rather mixed on the whole issue. Several well-known anti-spam people refused to even consider participation, because of the unsolicited spam.;-)
My personal take was that (a) the only complete copy of the IPO thingy came to my non-debian.org address (I think because I've submitted patches to Python and/or am part of the Python Software Activity), (b) I could really use the money, and (c) frankly, I don't mind spam all that much. I delete most of it, and sometimes it's vaguely entertaining. Most of my spam goes to my yahoo.com address for some odd reason. Oh, and I was a little miffed after being left out of the Red Hat IPO, so was really just relieved that VA hadn't forgotten about lonely old me!
(Personally, I don't have anything against RHAT; in some respects, like their use of Python [which a lot of Debianites have a twist in their panties about... witness pissiness I get about reportbug on occasion], I think they've put together a great product. More power to 'em.)
Out of curiousity, I skimmed that section of the prospectus and couldn't make heads or tails of it. My vague understanding of Canadian law indicates that securities regulation is left up to the provinces, so people in some provinces may be able to participate while some in others may not.
In the specific case of Marc (or any other Canadian working in the U.S.), I think if you have a SSN/TIN and a U.S. address they'd have no way of knowing you aren't a U.S. citizen. Like Marc says, there's no harm in trying.
The prospectus says that ESR has options for about $120k shares, which he can purchase for less than 5 cents each. You do the math...;-)
Of course, his wife may have to give him the cash to MAKE.MONEY.FAST, but that's a side issue.
(Incidentally, I got "the letter" and then "the headers of the letter," the latter addressed to my debian.org addy... anyone else get hit the same way?)
Really? My understanding of antitrust law is that the government must show harm to consumers from an abuse of "monopoly" power. Microsoft is most certainly not a true monopoly (operating systems are software programs, which are about as far from a true monopoly as anything in this world). At best, it has the ability to extract a premium price from computer manufacturers because most of the commercial software (most of which was not written by Microsoft) in the world will only run under a M$ operating system. Blame the consumers who bought PCs (and proprietary software) when what they ran was MS-DOS (or PC-DOS) for that dominance; it has nothing to do with M$'s recent marketing practices. For the most part, backward compatibility locked people into MS solutions.
I think the true history of M$ "market dominance" is far more nuanced than that which you suggest.
As point of fact, store owners only used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice" because their predecessors had been forced by the government not to serve black people. I suspect those store owners would never have developed the attitude of "screw potential customers" without a legal framework that shaped their mindset to behave that way.
That's a very different situation from that which lead to the ADA. Conflating the "civil rights movement" (more accurately, the "racial minorities civil rights movement") with the ADA is hardly apt. I'd agree with you (somewhat) if AOL had deliberately pursued a policy of "fuck blind people at all costs." It sounds much more like a policy of "we want to have lots of cool whizz-bang graphics." Saying these two attitudes are morally equivalent is highly specious.
I believe that ARM and the Hurd will not have a true "potato" release; still, Debian 2.2 will be on five architectures.
In any event, the number one complaint about the installation process (what interface the CD is attached to) will be automated in 2.2, thanks to some clever code that's been put together in the last few weeks. I don't know how well it will cope with machines that have multiple CD-ROM drives, like my P-III at home [DVD-ROM and CD-R], but for 99% of people it will be completely transparent.
As the others here have said, the "master" site for the ISO images is cdimage.debian.org. However, there's no need to burn a CD set just to install Debian; instead, get the "boot floppies" for the distribution (in disks-[ARCH]) and use those to get the base system up and running, then get the packages you need over the net using apt.
People appointed to these positions have no elections to worry about, only the job they're doing, so they have more of a reason to do it well.
A fairly optimistic view; however, there is a fair bit of evidence that unelected officials may be predisposed to "cosy up" to the industries they are supposed to be regulating. Furthermore, you might want to examine the Japanese concept of "descent from heaven" (or its American analogue) for reference: ex-bureaucrats have this interesting tendency to go and work for industries they regulated after they leave office.
Insulating the bureaucracy from direct pressure by the electorate has both good and bad aspects. The good usually outweighs the bad, except when Congress goes on one of its drunken binges of delegating huge swathes of authority to the bureaucracy without the constitutional authority to stop abuses (i.e. the legislative veto, declared unconsititutional by the Supreme Court). Things like Title IX enforcement have gotten way out of hand because of broad grants of authority from Congress.
Well, one-click is a little more sophisticated than what you describe. It probably works something like this:
Every time you "one-click" on an item, it checks to see if you've "one-clicked" anything else in the past 30 minutes (or whatever period). If so, it grabs that stuff and appends it to your item entry in the data base (and removes the old entry).
Then, a process runs through the data base searching for "stale" items (i.e. items that haven't been removed from the queue and have been around for >30 minutes). These items are then sent through the billing system and shipping system like normal orders.
Basically, you could do this with a cron job and a text file (time, custno, item1, item2, item3...). Perfecting the process is harder (you'll need some locking semantics), but I just wrote the algorithm out in 2 minutes. The cookies aren't the important part (that's just shopping cart tech that you can read about in old CGI books), it's the "automatic shipment" that's the innovation here.
"Web sites... directed to, or that knowingly collect information, from children under 13"?
Mark my words... this makes any site with any material that might remotely be attractive to children (sports sites or CNN, for example) well within their radar screen. That's how they went after the tobacco industry, because the ads are designed to appeal to young adults, so they obviously are "targetted at children" (you tell me how to target people who are 18 without including people who are 17, and I've got a bridge to sell you).
The FTC didn't issue the act; it simply wrote regulations that Congress authorized it to write under the act.
(Which explains why the FTC didn't do anything about the previous complaints: because it didn't have the statutory authority to do so. Without the statutory authority, it's illegal for the FTC to do anything [not that they wouldn't, of course, but the bureaucracy's doing something illegal is a little harder than doing something with Congress's blessing].)
Well, if they don't have to spend time raising money, they'll have more time to campaign properly. If they can raise the same amount of money more efficiently, that leaves more time to do other things.
In any event, limits on individual contributions haven't limited total campaign expenditures. The $1k limit has been in effect for 25 years, and campaigns continue to get more expensive. Contribution limits clearly aren't the answer.
The typology you present is at best outdated. Many rural communities have good Internet access (here in the boonies of Mississippi, I can choose from at least 5 ISPs at 56k, plus a cable modem provider). Even though I'm in a college town, if you travel one county in any direction there are still several ISP options.
Yes, so people outside major metros don't have ADSL. Who really needs it? All the applications for high speed for consumers are a "gee, isn't this nifty" effect that are done better through traditional communications channels anyway.
There are very few people in the U.S. that are completely isolated from the 'net. Those that are isolated can reasonably be viewed as being isolated by choice (my mom or grandparents, for example), in an era when you can buy a WebTV box for $100 (and I just saw a cheapo "email only" device being advertised on TV for less).
Candidate A gets several huge contributions from large conglomerates; these contributions are fully disclosed. Candidate A spends a lot of his time campaigning with ordinary people to get votes.
Candidate B has to get thousands of small contributions; these contributions are also fully disclosed. Candidate B spends a lot of his time campaigning at $1000/plate fundraisers to make money to support a campaign.
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Their review of Debian seemed awfully lost. It seems to me that they were comparing apples to oranges. If they had compared the VA/O'Reilly/SGI "boxed" version with Corel, Red Hat, and the others, it probably would have been a more favorable review, if only because the lack of printed documentation would no longer be a gripe.
And it doesn't have a "find next" keystroke, like "n" in less. And if you give a null search string, it doesn't understand to repeat the previous one. You have to type it in again and again. Very un-Unixy. Plus it often seems to do the wrong thing.
n works fine for me as "find next" in Lynx.
As someone else pointed out, w3m seems closer to what you want. It seems too much like the crappy TN3270-style "use the cursor keys and tab to move around the screen to fill in forms" to me, but I'll probably get used to it eventually. Plus I do like the way forms are handled in w3m (modally). I dunno about the regex-searching, though.
You might also like Emacs w3-mode, since it has similar controls to w3m (maybe w3m is supposed to be a w3-mode clone, hence the name... I've never made heads or tails of the Japanenglish man page).
I recommend anyone seriously interested (or even casually interested) in this topic check out Gattaca, an infinitely better exploration of this topic than this media rant. (Plus, it doesn't hurt that Uma Thurman is in it ;-).)
(you don't want to have the sovejt union one of that time at all, do you?)
Actually, the Soviet Union had a fairly liberal constitution (as does the People's Republic of China). However, it (obviously) was not followed in practice.
MSIE lets you assign sites to "trusted" and "restricted" zones, which is better than Netscape, but a per-URL scheme would be much nicer. Probably too late to get it into the first release of Mozilla, though it'd be a nice add-on project.
Incidentally, I've found lynx's cookie handling fairly good; you at least have the site granularity, which is nice.
Would the Germans also ban software under the GPL written by Scientologists? I think it's a fairly safe bet that at least some GPLed code was written by one...
(This sounds like a non-tariff barrier, rather than a legitimate social concern. Unless the software is designed to convert people into Scientologists, or Nazis, or tree-huggers, I can't see any good reason to ban it.)
Somewhat off-topic: while bandwidth and TV are great equalizers, movies are about the only "modern" form of the media that people in rural areas don't have equal access to. I for one don't like having to drive 1.5 hrs to see a good movie in a decent environment (yet I can go and see crap like EoD at my local 4-screen, zero-comfort theater), in a college town no less. The decent movies rarely last more than a week, and since it's a four-screener you're lucky if any of them are R-rated (except slasher movies).
Don't get me wrong, I love my DVD player (but that's only good for seeing the best movies of 1998 and early 1999, courtesy of NetFlix). And I did make the trek for Dogma (twice) and American Beauty, both of which are excellent films. Not Egoyan or Sayles, but then again nobody's perfect (except maybe them, on occasion).
The QA group has put together a page at qa.debian.org that serves at least some of this purpose.
The concept could easily be extended to better fulfil your request.
In the Memphis metro area, a new mall opened in February 1997 that was (at the time) one of the biggest in the country. Another is likely to open in the next two years about 3 miles south of the state line (either in Horn Lake or Southaven, Mississippi), that will be at least as big. Another megamall just opened about 30 miles west of Atlanta. All of these malls opened in areas where affluent people live and there is probably 60% internet penetration. Malls aren't dying, at least not in the aggregate.
Where malls will die is where retailers with online presences decide to choose between underperforming malls (i.e. >10 years old) and e-commerce. Some malls will lose out, but it won't be because e-commerce took their customers; instead, it'll be because e-commerce is more profitable than operating in a mall that's been left behind by urban growth.
Incidentally, I think the author has an interesting theory, and it would seem consistent with the government's actions with regard to crypto (which, after all, seeks a monopoly on the legitimate use of truly secure communications).
If anything, the power that the Canadian federal government has over itz citizens is more than that of its American counterpart.
I suspect that the Canadian federal government actually has less power over its citizens than the American one. Many perogatives that the US federal government has arrogated onto itself (particularly in the field of social insurance) are jealously guarded by Canadian provinces. Canada's federal government basically governs by carrot (big cash handouts to the provinces), whereas America's mostly governs by the stick. Granted, there are exceptions (the 21-year drinking age was nationalized in the US by tying it to federal transportation funding).
In any event, the RCMP hasn't taken to the practices of shooting pregnant women, leading assaults against non-traditional religious groups, and bursting into peoples' homes and killing elderly men for no reason, all in the supposed interest of protecting society from the evils of guns and drugs. I suspect if the RCMP behaved as our "law enforcement" authorities did, many more Canadians would be afraid of their government (and particularly of their efforts to disarm the populace, in order to further ensure the state's monopoly of violence).
Where are all those debian bigots badmouthing about RedHat's supposedly spamming them?
;-)
Those "debian bigots" (nice example of literacy there, bub) were rather mixed on the whole issue. Several well-known anti-spam people refused to even consider participation, because of the unsolicited spam.
My personal take was that (a) the only complete copy of the IPO thingy came to my non-debian.org address (I think because I've submitted patches to Python and/or am part of the Python Software Activity), (b) I could really use the money, and (c) frankly, I don't mind spam all that much. I delete most of it, and sometimes it's vaguely entertaining. Most of my spam goes to my yahoo.com address for some odd reason. Oh, and I was a little miffed after being left out of the Red Hat IPO, so was really just relieved that VA hadn't forgotten about lonely old me!
(Personally, I don't have anything against RHAT; in some respects, like their use of Python [which a lot of Debianites have a twist in their panties about... witness pissiness I get about reportbug on occasion], I think they've put together a great product. More power to 'em.)
Out of curiousity, I skimmed that section of the prospectus and couldn't make heads or tails of it. My vague understanding of Canadian law indicates that securities regulation is left up to the provinces, so people in some provinces may be able to participate while some in others may not.
In the specific case of Marc (or any other Canadian working in the U.S.), I think if you have a SSN/TIN and a U.S. address they'd have no way of knowing you aren't a U.S. citizen. Like Marc says, there's no harm in trying.
The prospectus says that ESR has options for about $120k shares, which he can purchase for less than 5 cents each. You do the math... ;-)
Of course, his wife may have to give him the cash to MAKE.MONEY.FAST, but that's a side issue.
(Incidentally, I got "the letter" and then "the headers of the letter," the latter addressed to my debian.org addy... anyone else get hit the same way?)
Microsoft broke the law.
Really? My understanding of antitrust law is that the government must show harm to consumers from an abuse of "monopoly" power. Microsoft is most certainly not a true monopoly (operating systems are software programs, which are about as far from a true monopoly as anything in this world). At best, it has the ability to extract a premium price from computer manufacturers because most of the commercial software (most of which was not written by Microsoft) in the world will only run under a M$ operating system. Blame the consumers who bought PCs (and proprietary software) when what they ran was MS-DOS (or PC-DOS) for that dominance; it has nothing to do with M$'s recent marketing practices. For the most part, backward compatibility locked people into MS solutions.
I think the true history of M$ "market dominance" is far more nuanced than that which you suggest.
As point of fact, store owners only used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice" because their predecessors had been forced by the government not to serve black people. I suspect those store owners would never have developed the attitude of "screw potential customers" without a legal framework that shaped their mindset to behave that way.
That's a very different situation from that which lead to the ADA. Conflating the "civil rights movement" (more accurately, the "racial minorities civil rights movement") with the ADA is hardly apt. I'd agree with you (somewhat) if AOL had deliberately pursued a policy of "fuck blind people at all costs." It sounds much more like a policy of "we want to have lots of cool whizz-bang graphics." Saying these two attitudes are morally equivalent is highly specious.
I believe that ARM and the Hurd will not have a true "potato" release; still, Debian 2.2 will be on five architectures.
In any event, the number one complaint about the installation process (what interface the CD is attached to) will be automated in 2.2, thanks to some clever code that's been put together in the last few weeks. I don't know how well it will cope with machines that have multiple CD-ROM drives, like my P-III at home [DVD-ROM and CD-R], but for 99% of people it will be completely transparent.
As the others here have said, the "master" site for the ISO images is cdimage.debian.org. However, there's no need to burn a CD set just to install Debian; instead, get the "boot floppies" for the distribution (in disks-[ARCH]) and use those to get the base system up and running, then get the packages you need over the net using apt.
People appointed to these positions have no elections to worry about, only the job they're doing, so they have more of a reason to do it well.
A fairly optimistic view; however, there is a fair bit of evidence that unelected officials may be predisposed to "cosy up" to the industries they are supposed to be regulating. Furthermore, you might want to examine the Japanese concept of "descent from heaven" (or its American analogue) for reference: ex-bureaucrats have this interesting tendency to go and work for industries they regulated after they leave office.
Insulating the bureaucracy from direct pressure by the electorate has both good and bad aspects. The good usually outweighs the bad, except when Congress goes on one of its drunken binges of delegating huge swathes of authority to the bureaucracy without the constitutional authority to stop abuses (i.e. the legislative veto, declared unconsititutional by the Supreme Court). Things like Title IX enforcement have gotten way out of hand because of broad grants of authority from Congress.
Well, one-click is a little more sophisticated than what you describe. It probably works something like this:
Every time you "one-click" on an item, it checks to see if you've "one-clicked" anything else in the past 30 minutes (or whatever period). If so, it grabs that stuff and appends it to your item entry in the data base (and removes the old entry).
Then, a process runs through the data base searching for "stale" items (i.e. items that haven't been removed from the queue and have been around for >30 minutes). These items are then sent through the billing system and shipping system like normal orders.
Basically, you could do this with a cron job and a text file (time, custno, item1, item2, item3...). Perfecting the process is harder (you'll need some locking semantics), but I just wrote the algorithm out in 2 minutes. The cookies aren't the important part (that's just shopping cart tech that you can read about in old CGI books), it's the "automatic shipment" that's the innovation here.
"Web sites... directed to, or that knowingly collect information, from children under 13"?
Mark my words... this makes any site with any material that might remotely be attractive to children (sports sites or CNN, for example) well within their radar screen. That's how they went after the tobacco industry, because the ads are designed to appeal to young adults, so they obviously are "targetted at children" (you tell me how to target people who are 18 without including people who are 17, and I've got a bridge to sell you).
Protect the kiddies indeed.
The FTC didn't issue the act; it simply wrote regulations that Congress authorized it to write under the act.
(Which explains why the FTC didn't do anything about the previous complaints: because it didn't have the statutory authority to do so. Without the statutory authority, it's illegal for the FTC to do anything [not that they wouldn't, of course, but the bureaucracy's doing something illegal is a little harder than doing something with Congress's blessing].)
Well, if they don't have to spend time raising money,
they'll have more time to campaign properly. If they can
raise the same amount of money more efficiently, that leaves
more time to do other things.
In any event, limits on individual contributions haven't limited
total campaign expenditures. The $1k limit has been in effect for 25
years, and campaigns continue to get more expensive. Contribution
limits clearly aren't the answer.
The typology you present is at best outdated. Many rural communities have good Internet access (here in the boonies of Mississippi, I can choose from at least 5 ISPs at 56k, plus a cable modem provider). Even though I'm in a college town, if you travel one county in any direction there are still several ISP options.
Yes, so people outside major metros don't have ADSL. Who really needs it? All the applications for high speed for consumers are a "gee, isn't this nifty" effect that are done better through traditional communications channels anyway.
There are very few people in the U.S. that are completely isolated from the 'net. Those that are isolated can reasonably be viewed as being isolated by choice (my mom or grandparents, for example), in an era when you can buy a WebTV box for $100 (and I just saw a cheapo "email only" device being advertised on TV for less).
- Candidate A gets several huge contributions from large conglomerates; these contributions are fully disclosed. Candidate A spends a lot of his time campaigning with ordinary people to get votes.
- Candidate B has to get thousands of small contributions; these contributions are also fully disclosed. Candidate B spends a lot of his time campaigning at $1000/plate fundraisers to make money to support a campaign.
Now which system is more corrupt?