The author of the Roaring Penguin rebuttal misses a point, one that's endlessly tossed around Slashdot. That Microsoft's (proprietary) TCP/IP stack is derived from the Berkeley stack is a good thing. As I understand things, the Berkeley stack is pretty much universal now because it was simply better than the closed versions. It's essentially the reference implementation of TCP/IP. And those programmers (not "thousands") who wrote it presumably meant for it to be used anywhere and everywhere.
This is the code the Internet is built on- it's a good thing it's under such a liberal license, and a good thing that Microsoft chose to use it. Certain things should not be GPL'd, and I think Microsoft has this right; open standards like this will never be fully accepted otherwise. A web browser, or a server, or an OS is an entirely different matter, though Microsoft doesn't seem to see this.
The FSF would of course disagree; they put ideology ahead of technology and have demonstrated that the "morality" of a project is more important than its success.
I understand MSFT's argument enough to realize that it's total bullshit. There's no reason why open-source is contrary to the principles of a free market economy. It is not a source of income for many of the people writing it, true- but there is nothing about it that prevents any business based around it. It's ridiculous for Microsoft to claim otherwise when massive companies like IBM are adopting Linux- not as an over-the-counter product, but as a basis for more (expensive) new services (and servers) they can market. Microsoft's paranoid attitude towards any disclosure of how its software works looks even dumber when you compare it to Sun, which is not remotely open source but is very liberal about letting people see its code.
What would be somewhat detrimental to a free market would be government subsidy of open source. However, the NSA has every right to experiment, and there's no reason for them to pay millions for a "shared source" license from MSFT when they can get an OS with code for free, and when they won't be able to pass along their changes. As for publicly-funded research, the GPL is probably one of the least restrictive license in use. I have to pay for software the NIH funded all the time- I'd love more GPL'd stuff.
If anyone can come up with a coherent argument against open source from a free-market viewpoint, I'd love to hear it.
By this standard, Jurassic Park should not have made the list. The "science" presented there is painful to think about after four years as a biology major. Star Wars, likewise; mystic fields surrounding every living thing sound more like Scientology than Science Fiction. The difference is that Star Wars doesn't ever try to pass its bullshit off as realistic. Forbidden Planet might actually score high on this scale; I thought the Id monster was sort of cool (and effects hold up surprisingly well for a '50s film).
I'm sick of top-whatever lists. They invariably fuck something up and piss a bunch of fans off, and are always too smug in their rating system. Don't tell me what sci-fi films to *like*, just tell me what's worth watching that I haven't seen yet.
It's sort of hard to imagine Gordon Bell sharing a stage with Linus, at the unveiling of a Linux cluster. Isn't he the guy who absolutely loathes Unix in all its incarnations, and has been steadily trying to kill it as part of his job at Microsoft? I imagine he (and his superiors) are foaming at the mouth over the fact that Windows isn't running this cluster.
There's another point to the issue of proprietary databases that people are missing. If you want their supposedly high-quality copy, you pay. If you don't want to pay, you wait until the public version meets your standards. Celera's database is copyrighted, but there's nothing that prevents other researchers from duplicating their results independently. It's not like gene patents, where an easily reproduced result is locked up for twenty years by legal restrictions, and companies that have no idea how to exploit their data can simply sue anyone who dares to do real research with "their" IP.
A final point- from what I've heard about patent coverage, both genome projects will see much of their potential for medicinal applications wasted because most of the genes are already spoken for by biotechs (and some universities, sadly). Now protein structures are being patented too. Makes me wish I'd been a history major.
Huh? Bullshit. I've seen "The Searchers" about five times- great movie, but nothing like "Hidden Fortress" (which I've seen about ten times- my parents own them both). John Wayne is not at all young in that - he was already 49 - and he's sort of a bitter old veteran at the beginning. I don't know what movie you're thinking of.
While I'm at it, I agreed with the parts of the article I understood. So much of Star Wars is derivative, but that's part of what makes it great as entertainment. I certainly wouldn't accuse Lucas of artistry or deep inspiration, but it is a (usually) superb use of the medium and the genre. Some people simply don't like it, I guess, but I think there are few movies that work so well. Sure, there are flaws- most of the time, they don't matter. It's only in RotJ that they really show through- unfortunately, because the effects in that were more polished. (Empire, on the other hand, was a truly great movie- I just like the first one better because it feels fresher and more epic)
Lucas may be a hack in many respects, but it's hard to imagine anyone coming up with a better "space opera"- all that Star Wars is. Besides, anyone who has Alec Guinness intone "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainny" can't be all wrong.
The alternative to patents is secrecy. With the patent system, you have the benefit of access to published research, and the publisher has the right to charge you a fee, NOT for reading the research, but for doing something yourself that uses the idea to make money.
For biotech, secrecy may be preferrable in many cases. So much of what's being patented (genomic data) is obvious or easily reproduced that patents are simply destructive. They may speed the pace up a little bit, but eventually they'll be a huge stumbling block for anyone interested in doing real science rather than leech off the hard work of others.
I have nothing against Celera keeping its results private (though they shouldn't be allowed to publish in a peer-reviewed journal). In fact, I'm all for that business model. There's nothing stopping a public group from duplicating their work and providing a free, open version. Sort of like the effects of the BSD license (a bit in reverse). If the data is patented, it's useless to anyone who can't afford to pay license fees- and there's no way around it.
OS X is UNIX and as such can run most linux software with a recompile.
This is an exaggeration. Have you ever spent serious time dealing with such issues? You have no idea what I had to do in order to compile OpenLDAP. Vim was a bit easier, but syntax highlighting doesn't work correctly yet because of termcap incompatabilities. Bash I had to simply find a binary for.
It's not the CPU and memory for visual effects that make me complain. It's the fact that I can't turn them off to speed up my computer, and the fact that OS X is so much slower than OS 9. Even without crashes and with the command line, it's still harder to use. I would have preferred that they preserve the old interface, just with a Unix base. Sort of like A/UX, but better executed. There's a lot of thought and innovation that went into OS X, but it didn't result in something that actually makes my life any easier. Especially since any machine less than top-of-the-line tends to suck mightily when running Aqua.
I've been using Macs since 1985 and sysadmin Linux machines, so I'm not exactly clueless with either. The tendency towards bloat- whether Netscape, StarOffice, GNOME, or OS X- is sickening.
I saw the full clause posted below as well. How can they have let that slip through? The MPAA will shit a brick when it sees this. I think someone has seriously misunderstood the nature of software-based security and open standards. Hackers won't even have to try hard to create the new equivalent to DeCSS. Just imagine: RedHat 9.0 gets released including DRM technology, with full code, and some 14-year-old kid in Russia posts the full "fix" for it a day later. What's the point? (Not that I'd mind; the damage is still done, though, if technology companies have to waste their time covering for content providers or face legal penalties.)
the flamage here has been pretty absurd. I don't think for a moment that MS would (for example) sue the guy who uses VNC to administer 300 Windows desktops, as long as he had a license for each of them. This is just dumb. VNC is a nifty app but so slow and primitive as to be nearly useless for any other task; a Windows box with VNC is still only usable by one person at a time.
I don't think rdesktop is in trouble either; fundamentally, though they'd rather people use Windows clients as well, they don't care if you use Linux on the other end. HOWEVER, you must have a separate license; this is pretty standard. Even a lot of Unix apps (commercial ones) require a separate license for each concurrent use. Thus, you can't (for instance) have an XP box in the server room that everyone connects to so they can run IE on their *nix machines, unless you buy XP licenses for each client as well. I don't have any problem with that provision; it doesn't seem fair to get around buying a site license by letting everyone connect remotely and use a single copy. I think people in this situation should just do the obvious and NOT BUY MS PRODUCTS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
The clause in question here is rather poorly written, I'm afraid, so I can't really tell how brain-dead it is. Here's a bigger question: if you run XP on a machine with MetaFrame installed so you can use Office, do you need both XP and Office licenses for clients? I know very little about RDP; is it like X, or does it export the entire desktop? If the latter, I can see why you'd need separate XP licenses too. This, then, is pretty absurd, and quite close to the IBM/Unisys EULAs you describe.
Aside from prior art, I think there's an even more compelling argument against gene patents- they aren't "non-obvious". Anyone with sufficient training and funding can perform the protocols the biotechs use to find genes for patenting. There's absolutely no innovation involved. Patenting a method for gene finding might be slightly more viable- except that these probably wouldn't be "inventions", they'd be more like a cookbook for an intro bio lab.
The real problem here is that, as often, the legal system can't keep up with technology. Gene finding might have been difficult 10 or 20 years ago, but it sure isn't today, at least not to reach the PTO's moroning standards. What makes more sense is allowing these companies to copyright their databases and sell access- Celera's original business plan*, and actually a good one. They could even charge royalties on products developed using their database. Unfortunately, that doesn't have as much long-term potential- a few years later, some university will come out with a better (free) sequence as technology catches up. So by patenting genes, biotechs ensure that they'll be able to buttfuck any researcher who actually finds a use for the genes, even if independent discovery of said genes would have been both trivial and obvious.
*They were going to patent some too. But they're not even remotely "evil" compared to Incyte or Human Genome Sciences. Craig Venter is warm and cuddly compared to some execs out there, and he has genuinely contributed immensely to public research.
I saw the "forbidden love" trailer at LotR with my entire family (I'd seen it before already). My dad, who loved the original trilogy, moaned at the end. Who'd have thought they could find a worse Annakin than Jake Lloyd? As for Natalie, I'm still wondering what happened to her after The Professional.
I'll probably go to Episode II on opening day, but I'm going to ingest suitable quantities of mood-altering substances first. The only good thing about the first movie was the sound went out for a few minutes, so we got free vouchers and I got to see The Matrix.
Here's a prediction using the same a priori reasoning about Ice Age: A Total Bomb.
Dude, the original teaser for Ice Age rocked (should be up on Apple's trailer site still). It doesn't look like it has anything to do with the movie, but manages to be stand on its own as a 2.5 minute animated short. How many trailers are both hilarious and coherent? Most trailers are simply a collection of a few of the best visuals and action scenes (or jokes, depending on genre). I've seen some great trailers of this sort that led to very disappointing movies.
That said, the second trailer for Ice Age didn't look too good, and I'm sure the movie will suck. But let's give credit where it's due- that first trailer was fucking awesome.
Steve Case spent years whining about MS and trying to get the government to act. I've heard he's an Ayn Rand-style libertarian most of the time. It's good to see Sun actually trying to do something about the problem instead of pushing the DoJ to watch its back. I think parts of the federal antitrust suit were legitimate, but this type of thing may be better worked out between the companies themselves.
That's because McCain is a Democrat in Republican clothing.
He's anti-abortion, bullish on the military, and opposes big government. Hardly Democratic ideals. McCain appears more Democratic because he tends to oppose some of his party's wilder ideas and their knee-jerk ideology, but don't make the mistake of thinking he's liberal. The American Conservative Union and Christian Coalition both rate him quite highly (at least last time I checked). Even when I disagree with him, though (I agree with very few things the Christian Coalition espouses), I'm pretty confident he's acting on principle. I can think of very few in either party I'd say the same for.
Bill O'Reilly brought a USF CS professor of Arabic descent onto his show and accused him of supporting known terrorists- a charge proven false some time ago by numerous other news organizations and federal agencies. O'Reilly said (roughly) "If I were the FBI, I wouldn't let you out of my sight for a moment." The poor prof- who made an ill-advised remark about Israel more than a decade ago and has since recanted- barely got a chance to respond. I used to like O'Reilly, but this episode was sickening. It's as shoddy as Geraldo, and far more damaging. Shame on Fox.
Yeah, they've done a great job looking out for our freedom. Republican politicians pander to American voters' xenophobia, homophobia, religous bigotry, greed, and self-righteousness. I'm not a liberal- I think the Democratic party promotes class warfare, race-baiting, and paranoia among every conceivable minority group- but I despise the intolerant views and phony free-market obsession that the GOP stands for. Either party is willing to drop any illusion of having principles in order to wring the last bit of cash out of special interest groups and corporations.
We're pretty much screwed here. Reform Party? Puh-leaze. Greens? Hippy communists. The only hope is to reform the existing parties from within. Let's see how many Republicans vote for McCain-Feingold, and then talk about switching affilitations.
I'm amazed anyone really gives a shit. How many people whining about it are actually systems programmers? I'm happy that they're distributing the source at all- it doesn't bother me that I can't redistribute modified versions. RMS gets tiresome quickly- he doesn't seem to draw a distinction in moral terms between this kind of license and the MS licenses. Moronic.
Also, I'm sick of hearing RMS talk about how "I'm not a supporter of the Open Source movement." Jesus, put the bong down and join the real world, where you have to cooperate with people.
wrong- CONSUMERS are supposed to benefit from a more competitive market. the government is not supposed to be doing this to look out for AOL/NS/Apple/Sun's interests, it's supposed to be doing this to look out for *our* interests. I'd say there's part of both happening- I'm really fucking sick of being sent Word docs.
Also, antitrust action probably shouldn't necessarily be punitive. Genuinely illegal tactics should be. I always thought the browser tying was a poor issue to choose to pick on MS with- they've done plenty of things that are clearly illegal.
I have one of these beasts. Picked it up for very little, but it clocks 100Mhz, has 128MB of RAM, and the best graphics (Elan). It is truly a remarkable machine (for it's time). It's definitely still a terrific X terminal, even if it's too slow for web browsing or real 3D work.
It's kind of sad- I don't have time to play with the Indigo, and an Indigo2 is my main desktop but is slow enough that I don't use it for much either. My boss has a pair of r3k Indigos that are just sitting on a bookshelf full of old computers. They weren't spectacular to begin with, but they're so much better designed than any PC that I'm depressed to see them gathering dust.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with these is that it's impossible to get SGI compilers at a worthwhile price, or to get commercial software that will run on them. I'd love it if someone would come up with a "secure" hobbyist license- nodelocked software at a hugely reduced price with if you send them your sysid for an obsolete system.
Slashdot Mirror
The author of the Roaring Penguin rebuttal misses a point, one that's endlessly tossed around Slashdot. That Microsoft's (proprietary) TCP/IP stack is derived from the Berkeley stack is a good thing. As I understand things, the Berkeley stack is pretty much universal now because it was simply better than the closed versions. It's essentially the reference implementation of TCP/IP. And those programmers (not "thousands") who wrote it presumably meant for it to be used anywhere and everywhere.
This is the code the Internet is built on- it's a good thing it's under such a liberal license, and a good thing that Microsoft chose to use it. Certain things should not be GPL'd, and I think Microsoft has this right; open standards like this will never be fully accepted otherwise. A web browser, or a server, or an OS is an entirely different matter, though Microsoft doesn't seem to see this.
The FSF would of course disagree; they put ideology ahead of technology and have demonstrated that the "morality" of a project is more important than its success.
I understand MSFT's argument enough to realize that it's total bullshit. There's no reason why open-source is contrary to the principles of a free market economy. It is not a source of income for many of the people writing it, true- but there is nothing about it that prevents any business based around it. It's ridiculous for Microsoft to claim otherwise when massive companies like IBM are adopting Linux- not as an over-the-counter product, but as a basis for more (expensive) new services (and servers) they can market. Microsoft's paranoid attitude towards any disclosure of how its software works looks even dumber when you compare it to Sun, which is not remotely open source but is very liberal about letting people see its code.
What would be somewhat detrimental to a free market would be government subsidy of open source. However, the NSA has every right to experiment, and there's no reason for them to pay millions for a "shared source" license from MSFT when they can get an OS with code for free, and when they won't be able to pass along their changes. As for publicly-funded research, the GPL is probably one of the least restrictive license in use. I have to pay for software the NIH funded all the time- I'd love more GPL'd stuff.
If anyone can come up with a coherent argument against open source from a free-market viewpoint, I'd love to hear it.
By this standard, Jurassic Park should not have made the list. The "science" presented there is painful to think about after four years as a biology major. Star Wars, likewise; mystic fields surrounding every living thing sound more like Scientology than Science Fiction. The difference is that Star Wars doesn't ever try to pass its bullshit off as realistic. Forbidden Planet might actually score high on this scale; I thought the Id monster was sort of cool (and effects hold up surprisingly well for a '50s film).
I'm sick of top-whatever lists. They invariably fuck something up and piss a bunch of fans off, and are always too smug in their rating system. Don't tell me what sci-fi films to *like*, just tell me what's worth watching that I haven't seen yet.
It's sort of hard to imagine Gordon Bell sharing a stage with Linus, at the unveiling of a Linux cluster. Isn't he the guy who absolutely loathes Unix in all its incarnations, and has been steadily trying to kill it as part of his job at Microsoft? I imagine he (and his superiors) are foaming at the mouth over the fact that Windows isn't running this cluster.
There's another point to the issue of proprietary databases that people are missing. If you want their supposedly high-quality copy, you pay. If you don't want to pay, you wait until the public version meets your standards. Celera's database is copyrighted, but there's nothing that prevents other researchers from duplicating their results independently. It's not like gene patents, where an easily reproduced result is locked up for twenty years by legal restrictions, and companies that have no idea how to exploit their data can simply sue anyone who dares to do real research with "their" IP.
A final point- from what I've heard about patent coverage, both genome projects will see much of their potential for medicinal applications wasted because most of the genes are already spoken for by biotechs (and some universities, sadly). Now protein structures are being patented too. Makes me wish I'd been a history major.
I really want an R2D2 bong.
Huh? Bullshit. I've seen "The Searchers" about five times- great movie, but nothing like "Hidden Fortress" (which I've seen about ten times- my parents own them both). John Wayne is not at all young in that - he was already 49 - and he's sort of a bitter old veteran at the beginning. I don't know what movie you're thinking of.
While I'm at it, I agreed with the parts of the article I understood. So much of Star Wars is derivative, but that's part of what makes it great as entertainment. I certainly wouldn't accuse Lucas of artistry or deep inspiration, but it is a (usually) superb use of the medium and the genre. Some people simply don't like it, I guess, but I think there are few movies that work so well. Sure, there are flaws- most of the time, they don't matter. It's only in RotJ that they really show through- unfortunately, because the effects in that were more polished. (Empire, on the other hand, was a truly great movie- I just like the first one better because it feels fresher and more epic)
Lucas may be a hack in many respects, but it's hard to imagine anyone coming up with a better "space opera"- all that Star Wars is. Besides, anyone who has Alec Guinness intone "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainny" can't be all wrong.
The alternative to patents is secrecy. With the patent system, you have the benefit of access to published research, and the publisher has the right to charge you a fee, NOT for reading the research, but for doing something yourself that uses the idea to make money.
For biotech, secrecy may be preferrable in many cases. So much of what's being patented (genomic data) is obvious or easily reproduced that patents are simply destructive. They may speed the pace up a little bit, but eventually they'll be a huge stumbling block for anyone interested in doing real science rather than leech off the hard work of others.
I have nothing against Celera keeping its results private (though they shouldn't be allowed to publish in a peer-reviewed journal). In fact, I'm all for that business model. There's nothing stopping a public group from duplicating their work and providing a free, open version. Sort of like the effects of the BSD license (a bit in reverse). If the data is patented, it's useless to anyone who can't afford to pay license fees- and there's no way around it.
OS X is UNIX and as such can run most linux software with a recompile.
This is an exaggeration. Have you ever spent serious time dealing with such issues? You have no idea what I had to do in order to compile OpenLDAP. Vim was a bit easier, but syntax highlighting doesn't work correctly yet because of termcap incompatabilities. Bash I had to simply find a binary for.
It's not the CPU and memory for visual effects that make me complain. It's the fact that I can't turn them off to speed up my computer, and the fact that OS X is so much slower than OS 9. Even without crashes and with the command line, it's still harder to use. I would have preferred that they preserve the old interface, just with a Unix base. Sort of like A/UX, but better executed. There's a lot of thought and innovation that went into OS X, but it didn't result in something that actually makes my life any easier. Especially since any machine less than top-of-the-line tends to suck mightily when running Aqua.
I've been using Macs since 1985 and sysadmin Linux machines, so I'm not exactly clueless with either. The tendency towards bloat- whether Netscape, StarOffice, GNOME, or OS X- is sickening.
I saw the full clause posted below as well. How can they have let that slip through? The MPAA will shit a brick when it sees this. I think someone has seriously misunderstood the nature of software-based security and open standards. Hackers won't even have to try hard to create the new equivalent to DeCSS. Just imagine: RedHat 9.0 gets released including DRM technology, with full code, and some 14-year-old kid in Russia posts the full "fix" for it a day later. What's the point? (Not that I'd mind; the damage is still done, though, if technology companies have to waste their time covering for content providers or face legal penalties.)
the flamage here has been pretty absurd. I don't think for a moment that MS would (for example) sue the guy who uses VNC to administer 300 Windows desktops, as long as he had a license for each of them. This is just dumb. VNC is a nifty app but so slow and primitive as to be nearly useless for any other task; a Windows box with VNC is still only usable by one person at a time.
I don't think rdesktop is in trouble either; fundamentally, though they'd rather people use Windows clients as well, they don't care if you use Linux on the other end. HOWEVER, you must have a separate license; this is pretty standard. Even a lot of Unix apps (commercial ones) require a separate license for each concurrent use. Thus, you can't (for instance) have an XP box in the server room that everyone connects to so they can run IE on their *nix machines, unless you buy XP licenses for each client as well. I don't have any problem with that provision; it doesn't seem fair to get around buying a site license by letting everyone connect remotely and use a single copy. I think people in this situation should just do the obvious and NOT BUY MS PRODUCTS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
The clause in question here is rather poorly written, I'm afraid, so I can't really tell how brain-dead it is. Here's a bigger question: if you run XP on a machine with MetaFrame installed so you can use Office, do you need both XP and Office licenses for clients? I know very little about RDP; is it like X, or does it export the entire desktop? If the latter, I can see why you'd need separate XP licenses too. This, then, is pretty absurd, and quite close to the IBM/Unisys EULAs you describe.
Jamie Zawinski has a rather unpleasant story about this on his site:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html
A very good example of how essentially harmless email can be seriously misinterpreted.
Aside from prior art, I think there's an even more compelling argument against gene patents- they aren't "non-obvious". Anyone with sufficient training and funding can perform the protocols the biotechs use to find genes for patenting. There's absolutely no innovation involved. Patenting a method for gene finding might be slightly more viable- except that these probably wouldn't be "inventions", they'd be more like a cookbook for an intro bio lab.
The real problem here is that, as often, the legal system can't keep up with technology. Gene finding might have been difficult 10 or 20 years ago, but it sure isn't today, at least not to reach the PTO's moroning standards. What makes more sense is allowing these companies to copyright their databases and sell access- Celera's original business plan*, and actually a good one. They could even charge royalties on products developed using their database. Unfortunately, that doesn't have as much long-term potential- a few years later, some university will come out with a better (free) sequence as technology catches up. So by patenting genes, biotechs ensure that they'll be able to buttfuck any researcher who actually finds a use for the genes, even if independent discovery of said genes would have been both trivial and obvious.
*They were going to patent some too. But they're not even remotely "evil" compared to Incyte or Human Genome Sciences. Craig Venter is warm and cuddly compared to some execs out there, and he has genuinely contributed immensely to public research.
I saw the "forbidden love" trailer at LotR with my entire family (I'd seen it before already). My dad, who loved the original trilogy, moaned at the end. Who'd have thought they could find a worse Annakin than Jake Lloyd? As for Natalie, I'm still wondering what happened to her after The Professional.
I'll probably go to Episode II on opening day, but I'm going to ingest suitable quantities of mood-altering substances first. The only good thing about the first movie was the sound went out for a few minutes, so we got free vouchers and I got to see The Matrix.
Here's a prediction using the same a priori reasoning about Ice Age: A Total Bomb.
Dude, the original teaser for Ice Age rocked (should be up on Apple's trailer site still). It doesn't look like it has anything to do with the movie, but manages to be stand on its own as a 2.5 minute animated short. How many trailers are both hilarious and coherent? Most trailers are simply a collection of a few of the best visuals and action scenes (or jokes, depending on genre). I've seen some great trailers of this sort that led to very disappointing movies.
That said, the second trailer for Ice Age didn't look too good, and I'm sure the movie will suck. But let's give credit where it's due- that first trailer was fucking awesome.
Steve Case is AOL, not Sun.
Oh, duh. Thanks. I meant Scott McNealy, who's nothing like Steve Case. Oops.
Steve Case spent years whining about MS and trying to get the government to act. I've heard he's an Ayn Rand-style libertarian most of the time. It's good to see Sun actually trying to do something about the problem instead of pushing the DoJ to watch its back. I think parts of the federal antitrust suit were legitimate, but this type of thing may be better worked out between the companies themselves.
That's because McCain is a Democrat in Republican clothing.
He's anti-abortion, bullish on the military, and opposes big government. Hardly Democratic ideals. McCain appears more Democratic because he tends to oppose some of his party's wilder ideas and their knee-jerk ideology, but don't make the mistake of thinking he's liberal. The American Conservative Union and Christian Coalition both rate him quite highly (at least last time I checked). Even when I disagree with him, though (I agree with very few things the Christian Coalition espouses), I'm pretty confident he's acting on principle. I can think of very few in either party I'd say the same for.
Bill O'Reilly brought a USF CS professor of Arabic descent onto his show and accused him of supporting known terrorists- a charge proven false some time ago by numerous other news organizations and federal agencies. O'Reilly said (roughly) "If I were the FBI, I wouldn't let you out of my sight for a moment." The poor prof- who made an ill-advised remark about Israel more than a decade ago and has since recanted- barely got a chance to respond. I used to like O'Reilly, but this episode was sickening. It's as shoddy as Geraldo, and far more damaging. Shame on Fox.
John McCain. Sam Brownback.
Read it on Politech.
Not that I think the Republican party sucks any less for this. McCain is a badass, though. Wish we had more of him and fewer like Lott.
It is now offical, I am becoming a republican. ;).
Yeah, they've done a great job looking out for our freedom. Republican politicians pander to American voters' xenophobia, homophobia, religous bigotry, greed, and self-righteousness. I'm not a liberal- I think the Democratic party promotes class warfare, race-baiting, and paranoia among every conceivable minority group- but I despise the intolerant views and phony free-market obsession that the GOP stands for. Either party is willing to drop any illusion of having principles in order to wring the last bit of cash out of special interest groups and corporations.
We're pretty much screwed here. Reform Party? Puh-leaze. Greens? Hippy communists. The only hope is to reform the existing parties from within. Let's see how many Republicans vote for McCain-Feingold, and then talk about switching affilitations.
Umm, Plan 9 isn't [gnu.org] open source...
I'm amazed anyone really gives a shit. How many people whining about it are actually systems programmers? I'm happy that they're distributing the source at all- it doesn't bother me that I can't redistribute modified versions. RMS gets tiresome quickly- he doesn't seem to draw a distinction in moral terms between this kind of license and the MS licenses. Moronic.
Also, I'm sick of hearing RMS talk about how "I'm not a supporter of the Open Source movement." Jesus, put the bong down and join the real world, where you have to cooperate with people.
wrong- CONSUMERS are supposed to benefit from a more competitive market. the government is not supposed to be doing this to look out for AOL/NS/Apple/Sun's interests, it's supposed to be doing this to look out for *our* interests. I'd say there's part of both happening- I'm really fucking sick of being sent Word docs.
Also, antitrust action probably shouldn't necessarily be punitive. Genuinely illegal tactics should be. I always thought the browser tying was a poor issue to choose to pick on MS with- they've done plenty of things that are clearly illegal.
I have one of these beasts. Picked it up for very little, but it clocks 100Mhz, has 128MB of RAM, and the best graphics (Elan). It is truly a remarkable machine (for it's time). It's definitely still a terrific X terminal, even if it's too slow for web browsing or real 3D work.
It's kind of sad- I don't have time to play with the Indigo, and an Indigo2 is my main desktop but is slow enough that I don't use it for much either. My boss has a pair of r3k Indigos that are just sitting on a bookshelf full of old computers. They weren't spectacular to begin with, but they're so much better designed than any PC that I'm depressed to see them gathering dust.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with these is that it's impossible to get SGI compilers at a worthwhile price, or to get commercial software that will run on them. I'd love it if someone would come up with a "secure" hobbyist license- nodelocked software at a hugely reduced price with if you send them your sysid for an obsolete system.