For those who are new to this, please start by reading the potato install guide. I seriously doubt that pre-burned CDs are available yet, but network installations should be possible.
The main web page (www.debian.org) still isn't updated, but we can't have everything, can we?;-)
I didn't interpret anything. I just posted some random thoughts that were percolating through my head yesterday morning. It's an opinion, not some damned Bachelor-of-Arts philosophical paper.
Prehaps you are referring to the works of Marx?
Hell no. I've never even read Marx.
I can see where you would get Marx and Locke confused, [...]
You're operating under the assumption that I was regurgitating the thoughts of some dead guy. This is probably the source of your confusion.;-)
(Which is not to say that my thoughts don't owe anything to the thoughts of people who came before me. Of course they do. But any Marxian thoughts in my head arrived there after being filtered and interpreted by many, many other people.)
Perhaps you do not think that information is the product of work and therefore can be owned?
This is one of those trick questions, isn't it? Your question boils down to this: "A implies B. Do you think B implies C?" Any answer I give can be construed as support for your initial assumption (A -> B).
I don't think that property rights derive from any "product of work" crap. Property rights derive from the threat (or use) of force. You own something exactly insofar as you can prevent other people from taking it away from you. Whether this is by defending it yourself, or by calling upon a government to do so, it comes down to the same thing in the end.
So it doesn't matter whether I think information is the product of work. That has nothing at all to do with the real issues.
Is one capable of owning a house
Yes.
(the product of work and information and raw materials)?
Red herring. A house is a house. It doesn't matter how it came into existence. You could own a house even if a genie from a bottle zapped it into existence with magical powers.
So it is possible to own an intangible and profit from it
These are two separate statements. I agree with one but not the other. It's not possible to own an intangible, except insofar as the government is willing to use force to perpetuate the illusion of "intellectual property". (Granted, they've been putting forth a valiant effort so far. We're hoping to change that.) But it is possible to profit from an intangible. People have been doing so for centuries now. Even without "intellectual property".
And to the person who questioned the moderators: you're right. I didn't think my original post was all that interesting, which is why I elected not to use my +1 bonus. I wrote it fairly quickly, without a great deal of thought or organization. I was quite surprised to see it had been moderated up twice. But it wasn't a troll -- at least, not intentionally.
An AC wrote: How do the Record Companies get Paid? This is still unfair to them.
CmdrNacho wrote: If you're looking for freebies, go to a soup kitchen or your local Salvation Army.
Well, that's exactly what we keep trying to tell them, but they don't listen! Buncha lazy good-for-nothing bums! They think they can get stuff for free -- that just because they've always got things for free in the past they have a right to continue this practice indefinitely!
It's time for the record companies to wake up. Their free ride is over. Their welfare state -- created and empowered by a government-granted monopoly on an infinite resource -- is being destroyed.
The world -- or at least a small part of it -- is finally beginning to realize that "intellectual property" is a crock of shit. Just because someone has a funny little C-with-a-circle-around it and their name on something, that doesn't mean that they have a natural right to make money from it. In fact, there is no natural right to make money at all. That's what a free market means -- you may make money, or you may not. You spin the wheel, you take your chance.
Now all we have to do is survive the mercenaries they're likely to send to kill us. (Hint: they're the ones with the red-white-and-blue flags on their uniforms. Bought and paid for by the RIAA using the money that you spent on CDs. You didn't think all that money went to the artist, didya?) At least the second amendment isn't completely dead yet. We still have some hope of living through this with both lives and freedom intact.
who is going to pick up your trash all day if they dont have to?
Not sure what you're asking. Depending on the exact scenario and how I interpret your question the answer could be any of:
You will, unless you enjoy living in filth.
You'll put your trash into the replicator to make new stuff.
You'll replicate robots who pick up trash for you, and replicate replacements if they break down.
What reason does Farmer Fred have to design new fruits?
He enjoys doing so. It brings him fame and glory. Chicks dig it. In a world without money, you still have fame, power and sex.
But above and beyond this, can you imagine how boring this hypothetical world will be? If designing fruit keeps him occupied, it's its own reward.
but it takes him 10 years to do it when he might have done it in 1 when he needed to innovate (sorry) to keep his income flowing
So? If people want new fruits, then someone will design them. You don't think Fred is the only mad genius in the world with the Godlike Power of Fruit Design, do you?
'sides, as I mentioned above, he's got nothing better to do with his time....
A compressed version of a song cannot ever be clearer than the original from which it was created. At best, it can only be equally clear.
For just one idea of how creativity can be rewarded in a society without copyright, check out www.fairtunes.com (or its half-serious predecessor, paylars).
Why would I want to store vast quantities of software installation programs that I will likely never use again, when I can just as easily download the latest version in a few minutes
Because often the new version sucks rocks, and you want to go back to the old version. But -- oh, wait -- you deleted the old version. Too bad. Now you're stuck with Netscape 4.x forever!
(Having seen what Netscape did, I now keep copies of anything that's good enough that I might ever need to go back to it. No more you-can't-go-back for me. Never again.)
However, with a warrant (although the Ellian Gonzalez case is a counter example), the government can for the most part do what they want with me and my property.
The government hasn't needed a warrant to seize your property for quite some time now. Thanks in large part to the War on Drugs, the government can take anything they want from you, whenever they feel like it! It's called Civil Asset Forfeiture.
If someone can't afford health care, good food, and safe living conditions, then why the hell are they having children??
First and foremost, it's because they're financially rewarded for doing so. The more children you have, the less tax you pay (if you pay taxes), and the more welfare you receive (if you receive welfare).
Second, it's because American society's view of sexuality is skewed. People are afraid to discuss contraception and abortion openly. Some people (you know who they are) commit terrorist atrocities like killing doctors who perform abortions, or lesser atrocities like harrassing women who visit clinics. Various religious groups (you know who they are) try to enforce their particular moral perversions -- homosexuality is a sin, masturbation is a sin, contraception is a sin, pre-marital sex is a sin, adultery is a sin, prostitution is a sin, ad nauseum -- upon everyone else by buying relevant legislation. Oh, and besides that, they try to prevent children from learning anything about sex.
In an environment like that, is it really a surprise that there are unwanted pregnancies? And that they're carried to term?
Also he's for taking away corporations' right to give money to politicians, which I think most people would agree with.
I was thinking about this the other day, and what I realized is this: making campaign contributions illegal won't stop them from being made.
Do you think that $1000 limit on campaign contributions really matters to corporations? They find ways around it. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that one of those ways is by a direct, secret bribe. Good, old-fashioned under-the-table cash.
If you try to make campaign contributions (from any source) illegal, all you'll accomplish is to make everyone give all the money secretly, and create even more secret alliances and backroom deals than we already have. This would be worse than the current situation -- at least now, we know some of the alliances. If it's all done in secret, we'll lose that much information.
At first glance, a better solution would seem to be: 'make campaigning illegal'. But that won't work either. Already we see phony fan sites and such that are actually corporate endorsements of a product, disguised as amateur efforts. I'm sure this already occurs in politics as well. If campaigning were illegal, you wouldn't be able to trust any web site with an opinion -- it might really belong to Susie Hacker, or it might actually have been written by someone who used to work for the Republican party's PR wing and who now accepts bribes from the GOP candidate (who in turn accepts bribes from corporations, large churches, etc.).
But I don't claim to have the answers. If I thought I had answers I'd actually try to get something done, instead of rambling on slashdot and hoping that someone else can pick up the pieces I drop and come up with bigger pieces....
wait, are you trying to tell me that Libertarians believe that corporates will cease environmentally destructive acts (get this) out of the goodness of their own hearts!!
This is a serious issue, and deserves a response. Nobody but Pxtl is likely to see it at this point, but I'm writing it anyway.:-P
We need to step back a moment and ask ourselves, 'Why are corporations allowed to do this?' If your neighbor were to dump toxic waste into his yard, which then spread into yours, you could take action against him. He'd be legally accountable, and would likely have to pay for cleanup.
So why aren't corporations held to the same standards?
Part of the reason is that corporations run the country. They pay for the campaigns of candidates, and they lobby for legislation that is favorable to their interestes. They can do this because they have money, and because money is the most powerful force in the US today.
Another part of the reason is because corporations own the media. The average citizen receives information from television, newspapers and radio -- so they just don't know anything the corporations don't want them to know. (You already mentioned this. I think your analysis is right on the mark.)
Yet another part of the reason is because corporations are like berserker terrorists: they aren't afraid to die. And worse, if you kill them, they come back to life stronger than before. If you sued a corporation for all of its assets and won (yeah, right), the corp. would just declare bankruptcy. The CEO, the directors and the shareholders would just start a new corporation -- likely, the people working for that corp would just report to work on Monday and the only difference they'd see is that their X Corp. mousepads would be replaced with X1 Corp mousepads.
You can't beat someone who doesn't stay dead.
Now, I don't have the answer to all of this mess, but part of the solution, I believe, must lie in making sure that people bear the responsibility for their actions, even if those actions are masked by an incorporated entity. If a ship owned by an oil corp. dumps oil everywhere, then maybe the board of directors for that company should be personally held liable for the mess. Even if the oil corp. folds because it doesn't want to pay for the cleanup, the board of directors (or someone -- I'm no lawyer) should then bear the responsibility until the mess and all of its repercussions have been cleaned up.
Any serious Libertarian (as opposed to those who just want part of the package, such as the tax cuts) will tell you that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other. Yes, I'm skeptical about how we can actually put these values into place in US society as it stands now, but what's the alternative -- to surrender and watch the world be destroyed?
www.fairtunes.com is spitting out a Content-Type: text/html;charset=8859_1 header. Lynx (at least 2.8rel.2 which is what I'm typing on) doesn't seem to like that at all. (It asks whether I'd like to download the page, or cancel.)
I must confess to being too lazy to read that monstrous HTTP/1.1 protocol doc right now, so I'm not sure if this is a lynx bug, or a protocol violation on fairtunes' part. But either way, it's something that needs to be investigated. Hope this helps.
Do you not understand the concept of Stolen Property? In my closet there exists a sock [...] IT'S MINE, DAMN YOU!
(Sigh....) I was hoping that we wouldn't have to go through this again. But here we go....
Copyright infringement is not theft. The laws that apply to physical objects (like socks) do not apply to intangible things (like large numbers, which some people call "software" or "digital music recordings" or "ROMs").
You cannot steal something that has no physical reality. To steal means to deprive someone else of a possession. If I make a copy of a ROM (or music recording, or whatever) that you've created, then I have not deprived you of anything, and therefore I haven't stolen from you.
Under current law in some parts of the world, copyright infringement is a crime. But it is not theft (nor is it rape, nor murder, nor any other crime but copyright infringement). It does not fall under the same section of the law books, and it does not carry the same penalties.
PLEASE, PEOPLE, STOP spewing this nonsense about "theft" and "stealing" and "piracy" -- those are propaganda words used by copyright holders. The issue at hand here is copyright, not physical property. Thank you.
That's speculation. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps not. Even if you're right, is this really so terrible an outcome? Will there be riots in the streets of Paris if they can't get American movies? Will American college students invade Washington DC with firearms if they can't get Japanese anime?
The purpose of the GPL is to protect property and limit it's [sic] use
Others have already responded to this part, but it's important enough to warrant reiteration. The purpose of the GPL is to promote free software which is, at its core, the freedom to share with your friends and with the whole of society. The only denial of freedom in the GPL is the part that denies you the right to deny other people the right to share. A lot of people don't seem to grasp this, which is why we see this debate over and over (ad infinitum) on slashdot.
[...] reflect the new and drastically lower price of duplication and distribution and LET US LISTEN TO THE MUSIC WE'D GLADLY PAY FOR
the customer is NOT right if the customer is (potentially) destroying your business model..
This is ludicrous. Businesses do not have any intrinsic or legal right to make money. If customers are "destroying your business model" then your business model sucks and deserves to fail.
How far have we sunk that people think that businesses' rights supersede their own?
If I was to encode an mp3 with PGP, send it to one of my friends only to have you somehow intercept that message, the only way you'd hear that music is if you went to the store and bought the CD yourself.
No. The easiest way for me to get that mp3 would be to wait until your friend puts it up on OpenNap.
(Well, that's not true in my case, but for someone with broadband Internet access it would be.)
Encrypted human-readable content is only as secret as the human to whom it's sent.
Ports to non-x86 platforms will probably be severely delayed (if they're done at all). Sam Lantinga says there are 25000 lines of inline assembly in SMAC, so porting to non-x86 architectures will be painful to say the least.
unless you see a 20-30% performance gain real soon now for Linux.
I don't think the performance ratings are terribly important for a turn-based strategy game like SMAC.;-)
However, the Linux port of SMAC fixes some (I don't know how many) of the bugs in the Windows version. So you are getting better value from the Linux port of SMAC than you get from the Windows port of SMAC. Whether that's worth the extra money you have to pay in your locale, only you can decide.
Win95/98 only costs $90 if you're upgrading from an older version of Windows. If you're buying a version of Windows 95 or 98 that you can actually install (as opposed to upgrading to) then it's twice that.
Oh, and don't forget that you need to buy a DOS. Of course, you can get that for free these days (I haven't tried installing Windows 3.1 on top of FreeDOS yet, but I've done it on top of Caldera's DR-DOS).
But anyone who is knowledgable enough to get Linux working, can certainly install windows to play a game.
A non-networked game, at least. Installing and configuring networking software on Windows is potentially very painful. Especially compared to Linux. (On the other hand, if I knew as much about Windows as I did about Linux, it might not have been so hard. But for me at least, it was extremely frustrating. I couldn't imagine my parents getting it to work at all.)
Call to Power may have a better user interface (far superior graphics, at least... not sure about the sound yet, since I've only played the beta of SMAC). But as a strategy game I have to say that SMAC is much better.
actually, i'd rather play good ol civ2 over either one of em
Are you saying that a gun full of corn flakes would nourish you as well as a deer?
I'd say it depends on the size of the gun, and how tightly you pack the corn flakes. A sufficiently large gun could hold enough corn flakes to feed the population of Ethiopa for a day -- much more nourishment than can be found in any deer I've ever seen.
Oooh! Is this the replacement for the apparently-dead BWap? (Guess I'll have to download it and find out.)
I'm currently using BWap, but it seems to have all but vanished from the face of the Internet. Days of searching have failed to unearth a single note anywhere explaining why BWap was removed from freshmeat and its directory renamed to BWap-old. That's very saddening.
If TekNap is a new and less-buggy BWap then I'll be a happy user again.:-)
However, Debian does provide packages for much of those things, specifically, there is a QMail package. (Though it's slightly different from most others because of QMail distribution requirements).
qmail is technically non-free (it fails to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines) because its license prevents redistribution of modified versions. Instead, one must distribute a patch which can be applied to the pristine upstream source.
Debian can't package a pristine qmail binary, because qmail's design conflicts with the Debian policy. (qmail uses ~/Mailbox for message storage instead of/var/spool/mail/$USER; and Debian requires that all mail programs use the Debian locking library, which qmail naturally does not use.)
Thus, Debian cannot provide qmail binaries. Instead, they provide "Debianized qmail sources" -- which is basically a collection of the pristine qmail source tarball along with Debian patches and build scripts.
I've used the Debianized qmail before, but honestly, I just don't like it. (It's also caused grief for a lot of people, since at some point during potato it stopped working. I don't have details beyond that, because I stopped attempting to use it, and stopped caring about it.)
Personally, I recommend building qmail yourself from the source code (download it from qmail.org). Debian already gave you the user-IDs and group-IDs in/etc/passwd and/etc/group, so that much of the installation is already done before you even download the source.
Of course, building something as fundamental as a mail transfer agent tends to raise issues with the Debian packaging system. But there's an easy solution: equivs. The Debian "equivs" package allows you to tell the packaging system that you already have a mail-transfer-agent package installed, thankyouverymuch, and please don't delete all the packages that depend on mail-transfer-agent.:)
Oh, and in answer to a previous question in this thread: the default Debian MTA is exim, not sendmail.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who are new to this, please start by reading the potato install guide. I seriously doubt that pre-burned CDs are available yet, but network installations should be possible.
The main web page (www.debian.org) still isn't updated, but we can't have everything, can we? ;-)
Interesting interpretation of Locke..
I didn't interpret anything. I just posted some random thoughts that were percolating through my head yesterday morning. It's an opinion, not some damned Bachelor-of-Arts philosophical paper.
Prehaps you are referring to the works of Marx?
Hell no. I've never even read Marx.
I can see where you would get Marx and Locke confused, [...]
You're operating under the assumption that I was regurgitating the thoughts of some dead guy. This is probably the source of your confusion. ;-)
(Which is not to say that my thoughts don't owe anything to the thoughts of people who came before me. Of course they do. But any Marxian thoughts in my head arrived there after being filtered and interpreted by many, many other people.)
Perhaps you do not think that information is the product of work and therefore can be owned?
This is one of those trick questions, isn't it? Your question boils down to this: "A implies B. Do you think B implies C?" Any answer I give can be construed as support for your initial assumption (A -> B).
I don't think that property rights derive from any "product of work" crap. Property rights derive from the threat (or use) of force. You own something exactly insofar as you can prevent other people from taking it away from you. Whether this is by defending it yourself, or by calling upon a government to do so, it comes down to the same thing in the end.
So it doesn't matter whether I think information is the product of work. That has nothing at all to do with the real issues.
Is one capable of owning a house
Yes.
(the product of work and information and raw materials)?
Red herring. A house is a house. It doesn't matter how it came into existence. You could own a house even if a genie from a bottle zapped it into existence with magical powers.
So it is possible to own an intangible and profit from it
These are two separate statements. I agree with one but not the other. It's not possible to own an intangible, except insofar as the government is willing to use force to perpetuate the illusion of "intellectual property". (Granted, they've been putting forth a valiant effort so far. We're hoping to change that.) But it is possible to profit from an intangible. People have been doing so for centuries now. Even without "intellectual property".
And to the person who questioned the moderators: you're right. I didn't think my original post was all that interesting, which is why I elected not to use my +1 bonus. I wrote it fairly quickly, without a great deal of thought or organization. I was quite surprised to see it had been moderated up twice. But it wasn't a troll -- at least, not intentionally.
An AC wrote: How do the Record Companies get Paid? This is still unfair to them.
CmdrNacho wrote: If you're looking for freebies, go to a soup kitchen or your local Salvation Army.
Well, that's exactly what we keep trying to tell them, but they don't listen! Buncha lazy good-for-nothing bums! They think they can get stuff for free -- that just because they've always got things for free in the past they have a right to continue this practice indefinitely!
It's time for the record companies to wake up. Their free ride is over. Their welfare state -- created and empowered by a government-granted monopoly on an infinite resource -- is being destroyed.
The world -- or at least a small part of it -- is finally beginning to realize that "intellectual property" is a crock of shit. Just because someone has a funny little C-with-a-circle-around it and their name on something, that doesn't mean that they have a natural right to make money from it. In fact, there is no natural right to make money at all. That's what a free market means -- you may make money, or you may not. You spin the wheel, you take your chance.
Now all we have to do is survive the mercenaries they're likely to send to kill us. (Hint: they're the ones with the red-white-and-blue flags on their uniforms. Bought and paid for by the RIAA using the money that you spent on CDs. You didn't think all that money went to the artist, didya?) At least the second amendment isn't completely dead yet. We still have some hope of living through this with both lives and freedom intact.
(Sorry, I'm in a bad mood this morning.)
who is going to pick up your trash all day if they dont have to?
Not sure what you're asking. Depending on the exact scenario and how I interpret your question the answer could be any of:
What reason does Farmer Fred have to design new fruits?
He enjoys doing so. It brings him fame and glory. Chicks dig it. In a world without money, you still have fame, power and sex.
But above and beyond this, can you imagine how boring this hypothetical world will be? If designing fruit keeps him occupied, it's its own reward.
but it takes him 10 years to do it when he might have done it in 1 when he needed to innovate (sorry) to keep his income flowing
So? If people want new fruits, then someone will design them. You don't think Fred is the only mad genius in the world with the Godlike Power of Fruit Design, do you?
'sides, as I mentioned above, he's got nothing better to do with his time....
A compressed version of a song cannot ever be clearer than the original from which it was created. At best, it can only be equally clear.
For just one idea of how creativity can be rewarded in a society without copyright, check out www.fairtunes.com (or its half-serious predecessor, paylars).
Why would I want to store vast quantities of software installation programs that I will likely never use again, when I can just as easily download the latest version in a few minutes
Because often the new version sucks rocks, and you want to go back to the old version. But -- oh, wait -- you deleted the old version. Too bad. Now you're stuck with Netscape 4.x forever!
(Having seen what Netscape did, I now keep copies of anything that's good enough that I might ever need to go back to it. No more you-can't-go-back for me. Never again.)
However, with a warrant (although the Ellian Gonzalez case is a counter example), the government can for the most part do what they want with me and my property.
The government hasn't needed a warrant to seize your property for quite some time now. Thanks in large part to the War on Drugs, the government can take anything they want from you, whenever they feel like it! It's called Civil Asset Forfeiture.
It's all for the children, of course.
If someone can't afford health care, good food, and safe living conditions, then why the hell are they having children??
First and foremost, it's because they're financially rewarded for doing so. The more children you have, the less tax you pay (if you pay taxes), and the more welfare you receive (if you receive welfare).
Second, it's because American society's view of sexuality is skewed. People are afraid to discuss contraception and abortion openly. Some people (you know who they are) commit terrorist atrocities like killing doctors who perform abortions, or lesser atrocities like harrassing women who visit clinics. Various religious groups (you know who they are) try to enforce their particular moral perversions -- homosexuality is a sin, masturbation is a sin, contraception is a sin, pre-marital sex is a sin, adultery is a sin, prostitution is a sin, ad nauseum -- upon everyone else by buying relevant legislation. Oh, and besides that, they try to prevent children from learning anything about sex.
In an environment like that, is it really a surprise that there are unwanted pregnancies? And that they're carried to term?
women who drink alcohol do so voluntarily [...] Date-rape drugs, on the other hand, are slipped into womens' drinks unbeknownst to them.
Oh, and I'm sure nobody has ever lied to another person about whether the punch in the bowl on the left is alcoholic or non-alcoholic.
The sheer quantity of alcohol available usually makes it the #1 drug in just about any statistical category you can name.
Also he's for taking away corporations' right to give money to politicians, which I think most people would agree with.
I was thinking about this the other day, and what I realized is this: making campaign contributions illegal won't stop them from being made.
Do you think that $1000 limit on campaign contributions really matters to corporations? They find ways around it. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that one of those ways is by a direct, secret bribe. Good, old-fashioned under-the-table cash.
If you try to make campaign contributions (from any source) illegal, all you'll accomplish is to make everyone give all the money secretly, and create even more secret alliances and backroom deals than we already have. This would be worse than the current situation -- at least now, we know some of the alliances. If it's all done in secret, we'll lose that much information.
At first glance, a better solution would seem to be: 'make campaigning illegal'. But that won't work either. Already we see phony fan sites and such that are actually corporate endorsements of a product, disguised as amateur efforts. I'm sure this already occurs in politics as well. If campaigning were illegal, you wouldn't be able to trust any web site with an opinion -- it might really belong to Susie Hacker, or it might actually have been written by someone who used to work for the Republican party's PR wing and who now accepts bribes from the GOP candidate (who in turn accepts bribes from corporations, large churches, etc.).
But I don't claim to have the answers. If I thought I had answers I'd actually try to get something done, instead of rambling on slashdot and hoping that someone else can pick up the pieces I drop and come up with bigger pieces....
wait, are you trying to tell me that Libertarians believe that corporates will cease environmentally destructive acts (get this) out of the goodness of their own hearts!!
This is a serious issue, and deserves a response. Nobody but Pxtl is likely to see it at this point, but I'm writing it anyway. :-P
We need to step back a moment and ask ourselves, 'Why are corporations allowed to do this?' If your neighbor were to dump toxic waste into his yard, which then spread into yours, you could take action against him. He'd be legally accountable, and would likely have to pay for cleanup.
So why aren't corporations held to the same standards?
Part of the reason is that corporations run the country. They pay for the campaigns of candidates, and they lobby for legislation that is favorable to their interestes. They can do this because they have money, and because money is the most powerful force in the US today.
Another part of the reason is because corporations own the media. The average citizen receives information from television, newspapers and radio -- so they just don't know anything the corporations don't want them to know. (You already mentioned this. I think your analysis is right on the mark.)
Yet another part of the reason is because corporations are like berserker terrorists: they aren't afraid to die. And worse, if you kill them, they come back to life stronger than before. If you sued a corporation for all of its assets and won (yeah, right), the corp. would just declare bankruptcy. The CEO, the directors and the shareholders would just start a new corporation -- likely, the people working for that corp would just report to work on Monday and the only difference they'd see is that their X Corp. mousepads would be replaced with X1 Corp mousepads.
You can't beat someone who doesn't stay dead.
Now, I don't have the answer to all of this mess, but part of the solution, I believe, must lie in making sure that people bear the responsibility for their actions, even if those actions are masked by an incorporated entity. If a ship owned by an oil corp. dumps oil everywhere, then maybe the board of directors for that company should be personally held liable for the mess. Even if the oil corp. folds because it doesn't want to pay for the cleanup, the board of directors (or someone -- I'm no lawyer) should then bear the responsibility until the mess and all of its repercussions have been cleaned up.
Any serious Libertarian (as opposed to those who just want part of the package, such as the tax cuts) will tell you that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other. Yes, I'm skeptical about how we can actually put these values into place in US society as it stands now, but what's the alternative -- to surrender and watch the world be destroyed?
Lynx 2.8.3rel.1 seems to be OK with it, though. (I'll have to try to remember to visit the site when I get home and can use a graphical browser.)
www.fairtunes.com is spitting out a Content-Type: text/html;charset=8859_1 header. Lynx (at least 2.8rel.2 which is what I'm typing on) doesn't seem to like that at all. (It asks whether I'd like to download the page, or cancel.)
I must confess to being too lazy to read that monstrous HTTP/1.1 protocol doc right now, so I'm not sure if this is a lynx bug, or a protocol violation on fairtunes' part. But either way, it's something that needs to be investigated. Hope this helps.
Do you not understand the concept of Stolen Property? In my closet there exists a sock [...] IT'S MINE, DAMN YOU!
(Sigh....) I was hoping that we wouldn't have to go through this again. But here we go....
Copyright infringement is not theft. The laws that apply to physical objects (like socks) do not apply to intangible things (like large numbers, which some people call "software" or "digital music recordings" or "ROMs").
You cannot steal something that has no physical reality. To steal means to deprive someone else of a possession. If I make a copy of a ROM (or music recording, or whatever) that you've created, then I have not deprived you of anything, and therefore I haven't stolen from you.
Under current law in some parts of the world, copyright infringement is a crime. But it is not theft (nor is it rape, nor murder, nor any other crime but copyright infringement). It does not fall under the same section of the law books, and it does not carry the same penalties.
PLEASE, PEOPLE, STOP spewing this nonsense about "theft" and "stealing" and "piracy" -- those are propaganda words used by copyright holders. The issue at hand here is copyright, not physical property. Thank you.
No one ever said IP laws are bad/wrong.
Actually, quite a few people have said that. Among them are Eben Moglen and Brian Martin. If you look at just a subset of the IP laws then there are a whole lot of people who've said they're bad... including the Free Software Foundation and The League for Programming Freedom.
Without them, the global economy would collapse
That's speculation. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps not. Even if you're right, is this really so terrible an outcome? Will there be riots in the streets of Paris if they can't get American movies? Will American college students invade Washington DC with firearms if they can't get Japanese anime?
The purpose of the GPL is to protect property and limit it's [sic] use
Others have already responded to this part, but it's important enough to warrant reiteration. The purpose of the GPL is to promote free software which is, at its core, the freedom to share with your friends and with the whole of society. The only denial of freedom in the GPL is the part that denies you the right to deny other people the right to share. A lot of people don't seem to grasp this, which is why we see this debate over and over (ad infinitum) on slashdot.
[...] reflect the new and drastically lower price of duplication and distribution and LET US LISTEN TO THE MUSIC WE'D GLADLY PAY FOR
Here, I think you're absolutely correct.
Have we been trolled?
the customer is NOT right if the customer is (potentially) destroying your business model..
This is ludicrous. Businesses do not have any intrinsic or legal right to make money. If customers are "destroying your business model" then your business model sucks and deserves to fail.
How far have we sunk that people think that businesses' rights supersede their own?
If I was to encode an mp3 with PGP, send it to one of my friends only to have you somehow intercept that message, the only way you'd hear that music is if you went to the store and bought the CD yourself.
No. The easiest way for me to get that mp3 would be to wait until your friend puts it up on OpenNap.
(Well, that's not true in my case, but for someone with broadband Internet access it would be.)
Encrypted human-readable content is only as secret as the human to whom it's sent.
where is the ppc demo, if I might ask?
Ports to non-x86 platforms will probably be severely delayed (if they're done at all). Sam Lantinga says there are 25000 lines of inline assembly in SMAC, so porting to non-x86 architectures will be painful to say the least.
SMAC has about 7 different difficulty settings. You were probably on the easiest one. You'd have to try to lose on that setting.
Next time you try the game, play on one of the middle-ish settings. That'll give you some challenge.
unless you see a 20-30% performance gain real soon now for Linux.
I don't think the performance ratings are terribly important for a turn-based strategy game like SMAC. ;-)
However, the Linux port of SMAC fixes some (I don't know how many) of the bugs in the Windows version. So you are getting better value from the Linux port of SMAC than you get from the Windows port of SMAC. Whether that's worth the extra money you have to pay in your locale, only you can decide.
Just buy a copy of Win 95/95 ($90)
Win95/98 only costs $90 if you're upgrading from an older version of Windows. If you're buying a version of Windows 95 or 98 that you can actually install (as opposed to upgrading to) then it's twice that.
Oh, and don't forget that you need to buy a DOS. Of course, you can get that for free these days (I haven't tried installing Windows 3.1 on top of FreeDOS yet, but I've done it on top of Caldera's DR-DOS).
But anyone who is knowledgable enough to get Linux working, can certainly install windows to play a game.
A non-networked game, at least. Installing and configuring networking software on Windows is potentially very painful. Especially compared to Linux. (On the other hand, if I knew as much about Windows as I did about Linux, it might not have been so hard. But for me at least, it was extremely frustrating. I couldn't imagine my parents getting it to work at all.)
Call to Power may have a better user interface (far superior graphics, at least... not sure about the sound yet, since I've only played the beta of SMAC). But as a strategy game I have to say that SMAC is much better.
actually, i'd rather play good ol civ2 over either one of em
There are a lot of people who agree with that. ;-)
Are you saying that a gun full of corn flakes would nourish you as well as a deer?
I'd say it depends on the size of the gun, and how tightly you pack the corn flakes. A sufficiently large gun could hold enough corn flakes to feed the population of Ethiopa for a day -- much more nourishment than can be found in any deer I've ever seen.
Oooh! Is this the replacement for the apparently-dead BWap? (Guess I'll have to download it and find out.)
I'm currently using BWap, but it seems to have all but vanished from the face of the Internet. Days of searching have failed to unearth a single note anywhere explaining why BWap was removed from freshmeat and its directory renamed to BWap-old. That's very saddening.
If TekNap is a new and less-buggy BWap then I'll be a happy user again. :-)
However, Debian does provide packages for much of those things, specifically, there is a QMail package. (Though it's slightly different from most others because of QMail distribution requirements).
qmail is technically non-free (it fails to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines) because its license prevents redistribution of modified versions. Instead, one must distribute a patch which can be applied to the pristine upstream source.
Debian can't package a pristine qmail binary, because qmail's design conflicts with the Debian policy. (qmail uses ~/Mailbox for message storage instead of /var/spool/mail/$USER; and Debian requires that all mail programs use the Debian locking library, which qmail naturally does not use.)
Thus, Debian cannot provide qmail binaries. Instead, they provide "Debianized qmail sources" -- which is basically a collection of the pristine qmail source tarball along with Debian patches and build scripts.
I've used the Debianized qmail before, but honestly, I just don't like it. (It's also caused grief for a lot of people, since at some point during potato it stopped working. I don't have details beyond that, because I stopped attempting to use it, and stopped caring about it.)
Personally, I recommend building qmail yourself from the source code (download it from qmail.org). Debian already gave you the user-IDs and group-IDs in /etc/passwd and /etc/group, so that much of the installation is already done before you even download the source.
Of course, building something as fundamental as a mail transfer agent tends to raise issues with the Debian packaging system. But there's an easy solution: equivs. The Debian "equivs" package allows you to tell the packaging system that you already have a mail-transfer-agent package installed, thankyouverymuch, and please don't delete all the packages that depend on mail-transfer-agent. :)
Oh, and in answer to a previous question in this thread: the default Debian MTA is exim, not sendmail.
(Some of you may know me as greycat on #debian.)