Its not like clicking "YES" to the question "Are you a terrorist" when your downloading Encryption software is a good way of stopping people
If you try to download Netscape 4.7, it will refuse to send it to you if you have a non-US IP address. That is the mechanism to stop foreigners from getting encryption software over the net.
To figure out how to use the CSRLIN command in QBasic 4.5...am I the only Slashdotter who is unfortuantly not 31337, and just reads Slashdot for the politcal stuff? Not that I wouldn't think that being a programmer wouldn't be awesome, but then I also think being an astronaut would be awesome. And to me, programming and astronauting are on a similiar level of things I won't achieve.
Just my 8% of 2 bits, I just wanted to speak up for the non-31337 Slashdotters, we are out here, and some of us are even posting at +1
It's like trying to sue a hammer manufacturer because some psycho used a sledge to kill one of your family members. You have every reason to be upset, but it's hardly the tool's fault.
I think the analogy is a little skewed. It would be more like suing a gun manufacterer for their gun killing someone...and this is being done currently in the USA. A gun only has one use, and that is killing&maiming. It is not a tool that someone is misusing.
On the other hand, probably 95% of guns are used for legal purposes. Perhaps less then 5% of Napster transactions are legal.
What this means, is that to the short-hearted people in Washington, this means that it was specifically designed to do illegal things, and therefore it should be banned. Which, is, as you said, high silliness.
Is post a ROM of Donkey Kong to a free web page, and then put a link to it on Slashdot.
A week later, the Nintendo of America lawyers would send a letter to Slashdot telling them to remove the post. This would stir a censorship debate throughout the country.
Slashdot will gather their lawyers together, and then send a letter back to Nintendo saying that
a) "Donkey Kong" is obviously taken from "King Kong", so Nintendo doesn't really have a trademark anyway.
b) The tricks in Donkey Kong were lifted from Highland Gorilla training tricks originally developed by animal trainers at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, and therefore the game belongs to all taxpayers.
c) Since the game can be gotten so easily on the Net anyway, how can Nintendo claim that the game is copywrited?
Mattel Inc will respond by blocking the Slashdot or any Donkey Kong related site with their censorware. A brave group of librarians will then prove that what they have done is block access into any site that mentions donkeys, or even horses, ponies,zebras and unicorns.
This, will of course, cause even more controversy, especially when rival toy maker Galoob claims that Mattel only did this so they could prevent children from getting to their "My Little Pony Web Site"
Bank of America claims that they have a janitor working in their St. Louis branch with the name and likeness of "Mario", and would Slashdot please take this down?
I think I have run out of silliness. Thank you for listening to my silly rant.
While 50K is a relativly trivial amount, it is not the money that is the important thing. Bill Gates can give 1 Gig $ to fund foreign immunizations (and nuff respect to him for doing so), but the thing is, that money is "cute" and non-controversial. It is a hand out that doesn't make any statements about changing the system.
Red Hat throwing their support behind the EFF makes a statement that they aren't about just business as usual. They are willing to throw money behind something controversial, and to say that a major company believes that the right to free speech is still important.
Although I still think if some of these companies could fight for something like a living wage and the end of the police state, rather then just the right to rip DVD's, but it's a start.
Last year I saw a windmill in the Flathead valley about 15 miles North of Missoula. I always thought it would be interesting to put a few servers in there, set up a wireless optical internet link, and have the worlds largest wind-powered ISP.
Probably most of you are old enough to remember thefall of cuommunism...how the monolithic beast that was the bogey man of the 2nd half of the 20th century fell in a week (or so it seems). Once one country rebelled, everyone saw that there was nothing behind communism and it fell in a week.
As long as Slashdot continues to stand up to Micro$oft, it will enable everyone to stand up to them. So keep up with it.
90% of techical support is not finding an answer, or even explaining the technical part of the answer. Most of technical support is providing emotional support to a worried user, and then explaining how to fix the problem to the customer, even if they don't have basic OS skills.
My expereince is hardly exhaustive, but in technical support, we were never wondering to ourselves what "Error 678" meant, or what "Netscape can not find host meant", we were trying to explain to customers that Netscape was not thier ISP, and that it was not that "our server" was down when Netscape was corrupted.
The techincal problems of any one software program are actually pretty easy to figure out after the first week or so of using it, it is the customer service aspect that keeps most help desks buzzing.
You could have one program displaying on the top, and another program displaying on the bottom. Then all you have to do is hook up and extra keyboard\mouse, and you've doubled your productivity.
While this seems like a really cool idea, and this will probably be standard in 5 years, I hope there is some kind of control on the monitor to put it back to 2D, or that any programs that use this have an option that lets you turn off the 3d display, because after a long night of playing games\surfing the net\etc. at the same time, this thing is probably going to give quite a few people headaches\seizures\etc.
When he was in college, Bill Gates worked as a waiter. One day, a customer calls him : "Hey,Bill, there is a fly in my soup." Bill comes over, looks at the soup, examines it, and walked away. "Aren't you going to do anything?" the customer asks. "Oh, don't worry about the fly, it isn't a bug, it's a feature."
Well, this is one subject that I can speak of with some authority. I was actually an employee, sub-contracted out to one of the many fragments of the once great Bell Empire.
The baby Bells, even as they are now, are too big, and getting bigger (witness USQwest);as well as using their monopolies to promote their own ISPs against local ISPs. As well as the fact that if something gets lost on you in a Baby Bell, it will take you forever to track it down through the bureacracy.
Although I have to admit that what you say could be true, I wasn't around during the "good old days", but I can only imagine that the bigger the Bell system was, the worse it was. And I have never had any good evidence to contradict this belief.
Although one thing I will grant you is that breaking up the Bell System eventually led to:::shudders::: all those Candance Bergen ads. Maybe if they break up M$, she will end up replacing the fraudulent paper clip as M$ Apps mascot.
I only have to half agree with you. On one hand, I don't think that copyright is as fundamental a right as the right to life, liberty, etc. And I also don't agree that this specific DMCA or whatever falls under the heading of a human right. (Since corporations, as another poster pointed out, are not human beings).
But...I think that almost every human society has admitted that people who invent something deserve some recognition and rights over their creation. If profit and the legal nicities of owning a copyright aren't universal, I think that the concept of some kind of rights or courtesies to creators are.
Because as much as I love the right of Americans to fairly exchange knowledge, I am not going down to Cali to do it. Are we going to have any mirror demonstrations in other cities?
In my own city of Portland, it will be interesting hearing the police explain why it was immanently neccesary to gas those dangerous free software protesters, who have been known to riot and destroy public property.
And BTW, I am glad that Slashdot is providing some links to "real world" political action. I only hope that eventually it will be some political action involving something more pressing, such as a living wage for all workers.
As far as I know, Qwest is mostly a long distance company, and one of the first long distance companies to use TCP instead of circuits for long distance. Since using packets instead of circuits in real time audio (aka phone) service presents serious problems of lag time, I imagine that Qwest is doing this so they can deal with the problem of packet control lag time.
The other reason they may be doing this has to do with the fact that they own USWest (or USWorst, as it is sometimes known), which is now the largest provider of DSL service in the world. Since they are still engaged in a campaign to sell DSL to everyone and their senile mother, they will eventually need more bandwidth to deal with all those new DSL lines.
That would be my guess behind all of this, but I do have a few questions:
Am I right about Qwest being a long distance company?
IN David Foster Wallace's 1996 classic, Infinite Jest , set in or about 2010, it describes Pink-2 as Microsoft's first Post Windows Operating System. I thought DFW was just making it up, but now I know where he got it from.
Although I think the idea of M$ dropping Windows for an Apple related OS is about as likely as gigantic packs of mutant hamsters overrunning New England.
That stands for "Bash is Not Linux"...after remaking Unix, I don't know why there is any particular reason to still use the Bash Shell (besides it usually works). But the Bash shell is not Linux, and neither are any of the others. The only reason it is added into Linux is by default, but it is only a matter of preference.
A GUI, or even an Olfactory User Interface, whatever, is no less "true" to the Kernel. The ideal shell for the Linux kernel for many users would probably be the MacIntosh shell, the best, or at least most elegant, UI ever developed.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I didn't know that it was one person that came up with these ideas. I thought that the mouse was invented by a man who graduated from Oregon State over 50 years ago, that the GUI was invented at Xerox about 25 years ago, and that Hyper Text (the transfer protocol, at least) was invented by Tim Berners-Lee about ten years ago. Am I missing something?
BTW, I was't able to post this comment with the title "WTHeck"...encountered a lameness filter. Lame.
Will this include MacOS X? Word on the street is that it will have a FreeBSD kernel. Which of course, will probably confuse people who talk about UNIX when what they mean is just the BASH (or what not) shell. MacOS X is probably the most inovative port of Unix to be mass released.
Just my $.02, mostly because I feel like putting an actually half way on topic post on this poor article.
Slashdot Mirror
If you try to download Netscape 4.7, it will refuse to send it to you if you have a non-US IP address. That is the mechanism to stop foreigners from getting encryption software over the net.
To figure out how to use the CSRLIN command in QBasic 4.5 ...am I the only Slashdotter who is unfortuantly not 31337, and just reads Slashdot for the politcal stuff? Not that I wouldn't think that being a programmer wouldn't be awesome, but then I also think being an astronaut would be awesome. And to me, programming and astronauting are on a similiar level of things I won't achieve.
Just my 8% of 2 bits, I just wanted to speak up for the non-31337 Slashdotters, we are out here, and some of us are even posting at +1
I think the analogy is a little skewed. It would be more like suing a gun manufacterer for their gun killing someone...and this is being done currently in the USA. A gun only has one use, and that is killing&maiming. It is not a tool that someone is misusing.
On the other hand, probably 95% of guns are used for legal purposes. Perhaps less then 5% of Napster transactions are legal.
What this means, is that to the short-hearted people in Washington, this means that it was specifically designed to do illegal things, and therefore it should be banned. Which, is, as you said, high silliness.
A week later, the Nintendo of America lawyers would send a letter to Slashdot telling them to remove the post. This would stir a censorship debate throughout the country.
Slashdot will gather their lawyers together, and then send a letter back to Nintendo saying that
a) "Donkey Kong" is obviously taken from "King Kong", so Nintendo doesn't really have a trademark anyway.
b) The tricks in Donkey Kong were lifted from Highland Gorilla training tricks originally developed by animal trainers at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, and therefore the game belongs to all taxpayers.
c) Since the game can be gotten so easily on the Net anyway, how can Nintendo claim that the game is copywrited?
Mattel Inc will respond by blocking the Slashdot or any Donkey Kong related site with their censorware. A brave group of librarians will then prove that what they have done is block access into any site that mentions donkeys, or even horses, ponies ,zebras and unicorns.
This, will of course, cause even more controversy, especially when rival toy maker Galoob claims that Mattel only did this so they could prevent children from getting to their "My Little Pony Web Site"
Bank of America claims that they have a janitor working in their St. Louis branch with the name and likeness of "Mario", and would Slashdot please take this down?
I think I have run out of silliness. Thank you for listening to my silly rant.
While 50K is a relativly trivial amount, it is not the money that is the important thing. Bill Gates can give 1 Gig $ to fund foreign immunizations (and nuff respect to him for doing so), but the thing is, that money is "cute" and non-controversial. It is a hand out that doesn't make any statements about changing the system.
Red Hat throwing their support behind the EFF makes a statement that they aren't about just business as usual. They are willing to throw money behind something controversial, and to say that a major company believes that the right to free speech is still important.
Although I still think if some of these companies could fight for something like a living wage and the end of the police state, rather then just the right to rip DVD's, but it's a start.
Probably most of you are old enough to remember thefall of cuommunism...how the monolithic beast that was the bogey man of the 2nd half of the 20th century fell in a week (or so it seems). Once one country rebelled, everyone saw that there was nothing behind communism and it fell in a week.
As long as Slashdot continues to stand up to Micro$oft, it will enable everyone to stand up to them. So keep up with it.
"Now, for only 15 dollars a month, less then the price of a daily cup of coffee, a third world child can have food, immunizations, and OS/2"
90% of techical support is not finding an answer, or even explaining the technical part of the answer. Most of technical support is providing emotional support to a worried user, and then explaining how to fix the problem to the customer, even if they don't have basic OS skills.
My expereince is hardly exhaustive, but in technical support, we were never wondering to ourselves what "Error 678" meant, or what "Netscape can not find host meant", we were trying to explain to customers that Netscape was not thier ISP, and that it was not that "our server" was down when Netscape was corrupted.
The techincal problems of any one software program are actually pretty easy to figure out after the first week or so of using it, it is the customer service aspect that keeps most help desks buzzing.
My question is, is it running bash, c shell etc, or did they custom right a new shell for telnetting, etc.?
And does the GUI run on top of the C shell, or does it run on top of the kernel?
When he was in college, Bill Gates worked as a waiter. One day, a customer calls him : "Hey,Bill, there is a fly in my soup." Bill comes over, looks at the soup, examines it, and walked away. "Aren't you going to do anything?" the customer asks. "Oh, don't worry about the fly, it isn't a bug, it's a feature."
The baby Bells, even as they are now, are too big, and getting bigger (witness USQwest);as well as using their monopolies to promote their own ISPs against local ISPs. As well as the fact that if something gets lost on you in a Baby Bell, it will take you forever to track it down through the bureacracy.
Although I have to admit that what you say could be true, I wasn't around during the "good old days", but I can only imagine that the bigger the Bell system was, the worse it was. And I have never had any good evidence to contradict this belief.
Although one thing I will grant you is that breaking up the Bell System eventually led to :::shudders::: all those Candance Bergen ads. Maybe if they break up M$, she will end up replacing the fraudulent paper clip as M$ Apps mascot.
Well, a very useful informative post, but it is "Sweet Melissa" by the Allman Brothers.
But...I think that almost every human society has admitted that people who invent something deserve some recognition and rights over their creation. If profit and the legal nicities of owning a copyright aren't universal, I think that the concept of some kind of rights or courtesies to creators are.
Just my 8% of 2 bits
Because as much as I love the right of Americans to fairly exchange knowledge, I am not going down to Cali to do it. Are we going to have any mirror demonstrations in other cities?
In my own city of Portland, it will be interesting hearing the police explain why it was immanently neccesary to gas those dangerous free software protesters, who have been known to riot and destroy public property.
And BTW, I am glad that Slashdot is providing some links to "real world" political action. I only hope that eventually it will be some political action involving something more pressing, such as a living wage for all workers.
How about favorite beers? You forgot #6: Free
As far as I know, Qwest is mostly a long distance company, and one of the first long distance companies to use TCP instead of circuits for long distance. Since using packets instead of circuits in real time audio (aka phone) service presents serious problems of lag time, I imagine that Qwest is doing this so they can deal with the problem of packet control lag time.
The other reason they may be doing this has to do with the fact that they own USWest (or USWorst, as it is sometimes known), which is now the largest provider of DSL service in the world. Since they are still engaged in a campaign to sell DSL to everyone and their senile mother, they will eventually need more bandwidth to deal with all those new DSL lines.
That would be my guess behind all of this, but I do have a few questions:
Am I right about Qwest being a long distance company?
Did the USWest deal ever go through?
What is the other companies steak in this?
IN David Foster Wallace's 1996 classic, Infinite Jest , set in or about 2010, it describes Pink-2 as Microsoft's first Post Windows Operating System. I thought DFW was just making it up, but now I know where he got it from.
Although I think the idea of M$ dropping Windows for an Apple related OS is about as likely as gigantic packs of mutant hamsters overrunning New England.
That stands for "Bash is Not Linux"...after remaking Unix, I don't know why there is any particular reason to still use the Bash Shell (besides it usually works). But the Bash shell is not Linux, and neither are any of the others. The only reason it is added into Linux is by default, but it is only a matter of preference.
A GUI, or even an Olfactory User Interface, whatever, is no less "true" to the Kernel. The ideal shell for the Linux kernel for many users would probably be the MacIntosh shell, the best, or at least most elegant, UI ever developed.
BTW, I was't able to post this comment with the title "WTHeck"...encountered a lameness filter. Lame.
Just my $.02, mostly because I feel like putting an actually half way on topic post on this poor article.