Slashdot's ads aren't really all that obtrusive, most of the time anyway:( If it's something people want, we could certainly conside it.
I would certainly consider paying for some of the sites I visit regularly. The problem is just that I wouldn't know how.
Like many people in Europe, I don't have a credit card (I just don't need one, why pay for it?). And international money orders or such are just way too expensive. Getting money from Europe to the US is difficult enough even if you don't factor in the additional complications and privacy concerns with paying over the internet.
Things like PayPal don't work either because they address the difficulty of managing micropayments, not the difficulty of transfering money over the Atlantic.
It is really ridiculous that money transfers would be so enormously expensive in the age of the internet. But as long as my bank charges me 10% of the sum transfered or $5 (whichever is more) for any money transfers, I'm not going to make lots of them any time soon.
We don't license music. When I purchase a CD, it's mine. There are no license agreements that I have to fill out, there is no disclaimer that I don't own it. I purchase a CD and have full rights to do whatever I want with it, in my opinion.
Of course you are entitled to your opinion, but don't expect that to hold up too well in a legal argument. Just try broadcasting that CD of yours at your local radio station and you'll have lawyers all over you before you know it.
The artists have the right to put their works under whatever license they choose to. And if they choose to sell all their rights to a record company that's tough luck for all the fans but that's life. Of course, now that artists may have a chance to distribute their works without the help of major record companies and still make some money with it all this might change.
It's exactly this change that the record companies should be very afraid of, because people are just not going to need them the way they did before. And in business, if people don't need you, you die.
I wonder how well the discriminatory licensing (Slackware, Debian are allowed to use the mods in March, the rest in April) would hold in court. Of course, I don't know Czech law, but I would have serious doubts under German law: Sec. 826 of the civil code forbids unfair business practices and one could argue that preferring some distros over others is unfair. Then again, the time frame is has been chosen in such a way that this licence is unlikely to be tested in court. Still, this is setting a disturbing precedent.
I don't know if it's just me, but I don't actually see linux-2.4.0test1 on the ftp-server. The README is there alright, but the tar.gz is nowhere to be seen. Looks like it has not been really announced and not really released either:-)
2.3.51 didn't compile for me. make choked on the parport device (undefined reference to parport_pc_init_pci() ). Also, I didn't manage to compile in sound support: the io address, irq and dma aren't stored in.config anymore. Seems to me that 2.4.xx is still quite far off...:-)
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I would certainly consider paying for some of the sites I visit regularly. The problem is just that I wouldn't know how.
Like many people in Europe, I don't have a credit card (I just don't need one, why pay for it?). And international money orders or such are just way too expensive. Getting money from Europe to the US is difficult enough even if you don't factor in the additional complications and privacy concerns with paying over the internet.
Things like PayPal don't work either because they address the difficulty of managing micropayments, not the difficulty of transfering money over the Atlantic.
It is really ridiculous that money transfers would be so enormously expensive in the age of the internet. But as long as my bank charges me 10% of the sum transfered or $5 (whichever is more) for any money transfers, I'm not going to make lots of them any time soon.
I wonder how well the discriminatory licensing (Slackware, Debian are allowed to use the mods in March, the rest in April) would hold in court. Of course, I don't know Czech law, but I would have serious doubts under German law: Sec. 826 of the civil code forbids unfair business practices and one could argue that preferring some distros over others is unfair. Then again, the time frame is has been chosen in such a way that this licence is unlikely to be tested in court. Still, this is setting a disturbing precedent.
I don't know if it's just me, but I don't actually see linux-2.4.0test1 on the ftp-server. The README is there alright, but the tar.gz is nowhere to be seen. Looks like it has not been really announced and not really released either :-)
2.3.51 didn't compile for me. make choked on the parport device (undefined reference to parport_pc_init_pci() ). Also, I didn't manage to compile in sound support: the io address, irq and dma aren't stored in .config anymore. Seems to me that 2.4.xx is still quite far off... :-)