The "TiVo runs Linux" issue seems to be the only beneficial aspect of TiVo; the rest reeks of the capitalist status quo.
You don't like capitalism? You don't like people doing things to make money? I'm having a hell of a time finding a gardener who isn't in it for the money. How about coming over and cleaning up my yard for free?
try, or rather don't, the fascist paen Starship Troopers or the right-wing gun-nut's wet dream The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
1. Starship Troopers is NOT fascist. It is, if anything, the opposite of fascism. People have trouble getting this through their heads. It is about why human beings fight. It's a coming of age story. It explores the concepts of what makes a good and a bad government.
Tell me EXACTLY why you think it's fascist. Because the only people who can vote are veterans? First of all, veterans means ANYONE who has completed at least two years in the civil service, not just the military. Secondly, while serving in the civil service, you cannot vote. Finally, you are free to quit your civil service job at any time (except for the military, who can only quit when not actively fighting). How is any of this fascist?
2. Moon is a Harsh Mistress is basically a handbook on how to run a revolution, sorta like the one back in 1776, which is quite clearly referenced. It, once again, is about what makes a good government, and Mike raises all sorts of questions on the nature of being alive.
I'm not going to bother to comment on your comments about Stranger.
Putting patentable ideas into the public domain, or GPL'ing them, doesn't prevent the creator from making money by being first to sell products based on them or by creating better products based on those ideas than others can make.
And that's simply not true. If you remove the cost of creation, then distribution and mass production costs predominate. It would be trivial for a large company to steal a novel, song, movie, whatever from a person who works alone and produces something. It's virtually certain that the creator will be screwed and the large company will profit. This is what people refuse to understand: copyright and patent are intended to protect the little guy against the big guy and the tyranny of the masses, not the other way around.
others: Linus Torvalds has a day job and still finds time to direct kernel development, the KDE team is largely made up of people who work for TrollTech, and there are many many sysadmins who Open Source tools they have created to help themselves in their jobs.
Linus started Linux when he was at school. His work for Transmeta is owned by Transmeta, not him. It pays for him to spend time working on Linux. If he didn't get paid by Transmeta, he probably wouldn't be working on Linux.
I'm not sure about TrollTech's funding, but how do they make money? VC funding? How profitable is the company? Companies based on open source are probably long-term doomed.
Sys admins who are contributing stuff done during work hours are technically stealing from their company; it's almost certain that they signed a work contract which stated that anything they create during work hours is company property, and anything RELATED to company work created at any time is owned by the company, too. Just wait until the first lawsuits which try to remove that sort of code from an Open Source project...
If you believe in "Intellectual Property", that's your business, but it doesn't give you the right to denigrate the work of those who believe differently than you. There is not *yet* a law that states that all intellectual activity must be undertaken in service of the profit motive.
If you subsidize your salable creative work with non-creative work, even if you don't enjoy your non-creative work solely because you think it's morally wrong to profit from creative work, you're either a saint or a moron. I can't decide which. If you're doing some creative work for money and some creative work for free, then you're a hypocrite.
However, just because selfish and immature cynics exist doesn't mean that real radicals don't.
I'm guessing that real radicals like to eat and have shelter. If they are going to give away what they produce for the Greater Good, they have to live off of the money/goods/etc. from other people, and they can get it either by force or the good graces of other people. The second option is wonderful in theory, but the first is more common in practice.
The sole reason why the Open Source movement exists is students and professors who have been living off of parents and/or government grants.
Granted, there are companies which are trying to make money from Open Source projects, but they are trying to profit from obscurity; their products are so hard to use, that people are willing to pay for support. I don't see that happening with books or music any time soon, and when people start putting easy-to-use interfaces on these Open Source products, these companies are sunk.
I've written code in my spare time which I've given away, but if I (or my company) was unable to make money from the code I write for them, I wouldn't be writing code, and I probably wouldn't have the spare time to write code that I give away. As much as I love to code, I love to take care of my family even more.
-jon
Re:(Yeah, well..) Darwin != Free, GNUStep is
on
No Love For Darwin?
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· Score: 3
So if you own anything of a Website with a shopping interface which is just a little bit too easy, you can't use Darwin. Sucks, right?
What the hell are you talking about? Apple licenced One-Click from Amazon for use in the Apple Store. That's it. If it's a worthless patent (I think it is), then Apple (presumably) paid Amazon for something worthless. It has nothing to do with what you use Darwin for.
So if you want to develop a Free MacOS X, GNUStep is a really good place to start from. I simply hope that by the time MacOS X is released, the headlines will look like "GNUStep: a better MacOS X than MacOS X":-)
And it's been what, 5-10 years, that work on GNUStep has been going on? How far along is it? Can it do any of the things which separate Mac OS X from NextStep? Will it ever?
I'm not sure how to get this through your pointy little head, but I'll try: Darwin isn't intended as a Linux/[Free|Open|Net]BSD replacement. It's simply the ultimate documentation for the low levels of Mac OS X. If it helps people write better device drivers for Mac OS X, it's a huge win for Apple. If someone can catch a bug in the OS, it's a great thing for everyone. If it lets people run Mac OS X on older hardware, it's a win for customers who don't want to buy new Macs. Intel support might serve as Apple's escape hatch from Motorola's incompetence, but that's still up in the air.
The political rationalle behind "free" software doesn't really enter into Apple's reasons for releasing Darwin, so don't look for one, or even complain about Darwin not being free enough to satisfy you.
If you read the MSNBC article carefully, you notice a few scary things mentioned, like "[it] is using it to build the Defense Virtual Library" and "another problem is with copyrights and other protections of intellectual property."
First of all, what's scary about the DoD putting its library on-line?
Second of all, only people who create nothing think that the creative work of others should be free. If copyright holders want to be able to track their work and make sure that their work is only available to people who have acquired a licence, I don't see a problem. In fact, it will be a HUGE help to individual authors/musicians/artists/whatevers, since they can take care of managing distribution all by themselves without needing a big company to handle it. Of course, promotion is still an issue, but that's another debate...
If you want to be a thief, you'll hate this. If you want to actually use the net to find stuff and be reimbursed for the things you create, you'll love it.
There was a portable 64, the Executive 64. It had a 2-inch b&w screen, a floppy drive (or two; I forget) and a C-64 all in a portable case. I don't think it was battery-powered, though.
Right now, the best way to do a portable 64 is via emulation. Frodo exists on multiple platforms, and Power64 on the Mac is damn good; it works well enough to run GEOS 2.0. Now if I still had my floppies full of games and a way to get them onto my PowerBook...I miss that 64!
Why oh why do they need to do these damn small install files that go out on the 'Net and get everything? What I really want is a web interface that will let me pick my components and then send me an installer package custom made for my selections. It can't be that hard.
The installer for Win32 had a checkbox: "Save Selected Components Locally" or something like that. It created a Netscape 6 Setup folder on my machine, which has all the bits it downloaded. Is that what you're talking about?
Ummmm 1976. Well, yeah, there's a problem. Carter, Ford. I think you're thinking 1980.
Ummmm, no. In 1976, Reagan challenged Ford for the Republican nomination. When Reagan gave an off-the-cuff speech at the nominating convention (when Ford was nominated) there was basically an "Oh, Shit" moment for Republicans, when they realized that Reagan would have made a far better nominee. Ford, of course, went on to lose in 76, and Reagan won in 80 and 84.
I can't understand any of the logic behind your ramblings, and I think it's because you're the one who is full of shit.
I get the feeling that you think some sort of Lord of the Flies existance is vastly better than 21st century America. Bullshit. If you think so, get your fucking ass off of the web and into the middle of the fucking desert and try to form your perfect anarchist society with all your other anarchist buddies. I bet there isn't a single useful skill among the lot of you.
I give a mindless fucker like you about a week before the buzzards are eating your (admittedly small) brains.
Topics like this one make me wish I had moderator status...
Jello Biafra is clearly a hypocrite, and the original poster was pointing that out. He hates it when OTHER people tell him how to live his life (and try to control who can listen to his music), but he wants to control other people and tell them how to live their lives (maximum wages, no SUVs, etc). Although I wonder how he intends to enforce any of his wacky ideas if he gets rid of the army and the police...
Yawn. Another fascist in anarchist clothing.
And if your incoherent ramblings are the best arguments a Biafra supporter can muster, it's not too shocking that no one outside of his fellow fascists takes him seriously.
I'm not going to bother arguing with Holocaust deniers; it's like arguing with Creationists. Both groups spend their time arguing red herrings and show a willful ignorance on science and history. But luckily, others fight these fights for me. Here's one, with references. Anyone who has issues with the veracity of The Straight Dope can go argue with Cecil...
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mdeniers.html
And I'm always curious: why is it that anti-Semites deny the Holocaust happened? They keep running around, talking about killing Jews; you'd think they'd be proud of what Hitler and his goons did. But no, they deny it happened. Yet, they keep on saying that they'll kill all the Jews, if they get the chance. Odd.
Oh, duh, I forgot to mention: countries like Britian and Monaco still have religious tests to assume the throne. Anyone going to start protesting their legitimacy?
It is unethical to establish a race-based state. That is racist on its face. This is merely a consistent application of the principle behind the fact that Rhodesia and South Africa were not ethical as apartheid states.
It's not a race-based state, but a religion-based state. Entirely different. It's as legal as Vatican City is. Anyone who wants to become a Jew can become a Jew. I've yet to hear of a way for a black person to become white, but science is always improving.
Sounds like there's horrible and pervasive racism still today: "Israel's Apartheid".
And yet the article mentions that there's an Arab justice on the Israeli Supreme Court, that Miss Israel is an Arab, and that the Supreme Court has ruled that anti-Arab discrimination is illegal. Like I said, it's not perfect and there's still discrimination, but it's not like South Africa.
This is the point. A Jewish state was founded, displacing the Palestinans
See, this I don't get. The land of Israel (ignoring the West Bank and Gaza) supports a population of roughly six million, a million of whom are Arabs. In 1948, the population of the part of Palestine which became Israel was WAY under a million. About 300,000 Arabs fled Israel and became refugees. Considering how many people are there now, population pressures wouldn't have forced out those people.
50 year later, there are 3 MILLION people who claim to be refugees. This is an astonishing population growth. It's also crap. My great-grandfather fled Russia to avoid pogroms. Does that mean that all of his descendants are entitled to land in Russia? If so, please tell me how to collect. If it will help me get sympathy, I'll move my family into a tent and throw rocks at Russian troops. Anyone care to bet whether or not they'll use live ammo?
And, of course, if the Arab countries hadn't kicked out so many Jews, then they wouldn't have come to Israel to displace Arabs.
Anyway, it's not like there were no Jews in Palestine, and the one day in 1948, five million showed up and killed any Arabs they found, forcing the rest to flee. There were Jews in Israel at the time of its founding, and there have always been Jews there. Relatively large numbers started to return in the 1880s, but Jews had been in places like Tiberias, Jerusalem, and Hebron for basically forever. It's just that after a couple of thousand years of persecution, it was realized that maybe having a place to call home wouldn't be a bad thing. In short, there wouldn't have been a Jewish homeland if one hadn't been needed.
And they live like blacks used to live in the US and South Africa.
I'm not aware of any "Arab-only" water fountains or lunch counters in Israel, and I don't recall ever hearing about black people holding public office in South Africa or the US when segration was in full force. But I could be wrong.
I'm not saying that life is perfect for Arabs in Israel; there is discrimination, and it's wrong. Israel has certainly taken away land from Arab residents without just compensation, and Arabs are excluded from many things (the army in particular), based on security concerns. But let's keep our facts straight.
The US is who is backing Israel. So their relative ineptitude with PR is not important.
Which is true for now, but I don't think the US is going to be backing Israel in 5-10 years, if things continue the way they are now. Would the US stand up to another oil boycott? Would Americans blame Israel (and Jews in general) for it? I think the answers are fairly obvious. I'm pretty sure that most Americans would give up support for Israel if it would knock a buck off the price of gas. I might be selling people short, but not by much. Maybe two bucks would be the cutoff point, I dunno.
Now I see that the Jews are repeating their historical tendencies to be an extremely selfish people. Nation after nation, throughout time have sooner or later, realised this. Its time to realise it again.
The Jews have suppressed and taken advantage of the working class time and time again. Currently, they have strong influence in the film industry (MPAA), and in the music industry (RIAA). What will it take to reform them?
Ah. A Jew-hater. Very good. Easy to pick apart.
Since you seem to think that there is no individual Jew, but rather a single, nefarious Jew, I'll talk about it that way.
Isn't it funny how those pesky Jews took advantage of the working class, and yet they wrote the Communist Manifesto (Marx) and founded the CIO (Samuel Gompers). And they hate the poor so much, the evil Jews wrote the poem on the Statue of Liberty (Emma Lazarus). And then there's the evil Einstein Jew, who founded Pugwash.
Those black-hating Jews helped found the NAACP, and its first three presidents were evil, evil Jews.
Selfish Jew Haym Solomon helped fund the American Revolutionary War. Jew organizations like Mazon raise money to feed the hungry (and as I'm sure you'll tell me, all Jews are rich, so obviously there aren't any hungry ones, yet they are raising money for hungry people, and they only raise money for Jews...is your head going to explode?). If you take a look at http://www.ziv.org/ziv_links.html, you'll see a whole page of charities for Selfish Jews, like the one which raises money to keep poor Pakistani children from being used as child labor (but, your feeble mind says, that's helping poor workers AND Muslims! Those dastardly Jews, always trying to cover for themselves!). And those Muslim-hating Jews in Israel were among the first countries to offer support to the Muslim Kosovo refugees, far earlier than any of the Arab nations did.
I could go on and on with examples that refute your stupid bigotry. But hate-filled people like yourself won't listen, and those that understand that your head is filled with straw don't need the examples.
They claim to have owned the space the flat was built upon two thousand years previously, but have no real evidence of specifici ownership of your flat or the land it was built on, beyond a vague history that it was once ruled by their ethnic group (even in the days of the Israelites non-israelites traded with and lived in Israel).
And they still do. Arabs who didn't run when Israel was founded (either because they thought they'd be killed or because they thought they were regrouping for the final assault to push the Jews into the sea) still live there. Roughly 20% of the Israeli population isn't Jewish. Their freedom of religion is respected and they are able to vote and hold seats in the parliment (in fact, there were 3 Arab members of the first Israeli parliment). The recent problems with Israeli Arabs rioting in support of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is a new phenonmenon.
Oh, and by the by, the holy books of both Christians and Moslems say that the land of Palestine is Jewish land.
Meanwhile you can trace the deed to your property back hundreds of years, documented by authorities established there hundreds of years previously and recognized by the entire world (including the United Nations), the exception being an occupying power making claims to your land in direct violation of international charter and law.
You mean like Yassar Arafat, who was born in Cairo? Or Eduard Said, whose family had left Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel? Strong claims they have there.
And where is the compensation for the Jewish refugees who were kicked out of Arab lands? Just because Israel took care of Jews who were kicked out and didn't leave them to rot in camps like the Arabs did to the Palestinians doesn't mean that the Jews shouldn't be compensated, too.
So, based on this vague notion of history and spurious claim, they kick you out of your flat and, when you join a protest against this action and begin throwing rocks at those you feel are oppressing you, fire bullets into the crowd killing you or some of your fellow protestors, then pat themselves on the back for their "restraint." This, in a context where any civilized country answers rioting and rock throwing with tear gas, water canons, and night-sticks, not machine guns, tanks, and rocket fire.
I take it you aren't aware of the Intifada which ran from the mid-80's to the early 90's. That was mainly rock-throwing children and teens against rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons. There were still deaths, but at a far lower rate than what we're seeing now. The new uprising has people with guns using rock-throwing children as cover. They should be ashamed of themselves. Instead, they bus in more children.
What's going on in Gilo/Beit Jala is more of the same. People who don't even live in Beit Jala are coming there at night, and shooting at Jews in Gilo, hoping to get the Israelis to damage the property and kill the residents of Beit Jala, so the international media will condemn Israel, and the residents of Beit Jala will join the fighting. The Israelis, ham-handed as they are at PR and the like, don't know how to get this story well-publicized and instead act like big bullies by shooting rockets at Beit Jala.
Are the Israelis doing the wrong thing? Yeah, probably. As I said, they don't understand PR. Israel sees itself as an island surrounded by hostiles in a world which has shown time and again that it would like nothing more than to get rid of the Jews. Condemnation by the UN isn't a big deal compared to the fallout from being called Christ-killers for 2,000 years. The Israelis are going to do what will protect themselves the most, and damn the consequences. This is a highly paranoid and stupid strategy which is going to backfire, sooner or later.
But anyone who thinks that all of this fussin' and fightin' is going to be ended if the Israelis just packed up and left the West Bank and Gaza is delusional. The Palestinians aren't going to be satisfied until there isn't a Jew left in the land. If you don't belive me, listen to some of the lovely sermons being given in the mosques, or some of Arafat's speeches when the Western media isn't watching. If Israel doesn't figure out how to get more of the world's opinion on its side, when the time comes that the Palestinians/Arabs do seriously threaten to push the Jews into the sea, the rest of the world is going to sit back and say that they deserve it.
I wish I had a solution to the problem that everyone could agree to, but I don't. But at least get your facts straight before arguing your point.
Actually, thou shall not kill other members of the "chosen" people is the way it seems to have been intended, based on the rest of the Old Testament (or the Jewish Bible, if you prefer).
This is, of course, anti-Semitic horseshit.
Here is Exodus 21:12-14:
"One who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death, but not if it is unintentional, but God allows it to happen: then I will apoint you a place where he shall flee."
There's nothing there about "Hebrew" or "Israelite" or anything else. It says MAN (which in Hebrew includes the feminine gender). It also includes the concept of unintentional murder, which is vaguely analagous to homicide in American law.
As for the amazingly bloody wars described in the Torah and the rest of the Jewish Bible, they were quite the norm at the time. The Amalakites, for example, are singled out for destruction because rather than attacking the Hebrews head-on (where the men would be), they attacked the rear, where the women, children, and the feeble would be.
Now go crawl back under the rock from whence you came.
Apple, for example, had Woz (2) and Jobs (1 and 3).
Actually, back in the day, Jobs had about zero business sense, other than the sense that Woz's computer might have a market. It was Mike Markukla (sp?) who was the "suit" to go along with the "geek" (Woz) and the "visionary" (Jobs).
Mike actually hung around on the Apple board until the Great Putsch of 1998, when Jobs retook Apple.
if this law is passed and MP3.com already has to pay a few cents to record companies for my.mp3.com, will mp3.com be able to stop paying the companies, or since the settlements were made before this law would they stil have to pay
They will probably have to continue paying. The settlement between mp3.com and the RIAA labels is a private contract. If it turns out that mp3.com bought something useless (rights to broadcast music that are free), so be it.
What makes it even more sick is that if mp3.com just says, "screw it, we won't pay the RIAA, because the contract is worthless", they can be sued for breach of contract, and they'll probably lose. Unless there's some sort of escape clause already in the contracts, I dunno.
Imagine this: The race is won 46% to 45%, with 8% going to one third party cadidate, and 1% going to someone else.
You had better believe the 45% loser is looking hard and long at that 8%. Maybe if they had taken a platform that attract that 8% as well, they could have won.
Horsepucky. They'd evaluate if going after that 8% would cost them any of their current support, vs. going after an additional 1% from the winner without losing any of the current support.
Considering the radical differences between the Green platform and the platforms of either the Dems or Repubs, it's highly likely that they'd lose far more current support than they'd gain new support by trying to attract Green followers.
Oh, I agree with you that Gore's position is awful. I've got someone else calling me all sorts of awful names in another thread for picking apart his stupid scheme.
I don't see any reason why there need to be ANY public access terminals. People can surf porn sites on their own dime.
There should be public access terminals for the same reason there are public libraries and public schools. It is in everyone's best interest that we have an educated populace. Right now, this means exposing them to the Internet, as well as the books in a library and compulsary education until the age of 16.
This is why the school voucher nonsense pisses me off so much. If we want to give money to parents to send their kids to private schools, then fine, do it from some other source of revenue other than the funds targeted towards public education. Or (gasp) raise taxes to pay for vouchers. But taking away from the public schools because your kids aren't going to go there is mean-spirited. Can the childless get voucher money back? And if I promise not to call the police or fire department, can I get my share of their funding back? The death of the concept of the common good is the curse heaped on us by conservatives in the US.
And, no, public terminals shouldn't be used for porn, but I've yet to hear of a system that doesn't throw the baby (non-porn) out with the bathwater (porn), and I don't think it can be done. And if we filter for porn, do we filter for abortion? How long before some cracker starts making noise about the government aiding and abeting abortions because they aren't filtering out information on it?
If you think abortion is too extreme, how about drug legalization? Research on far-out political parties?
1. According to the Constitution, the President submits a budget to the House of Representatives (where all tax bills must start, once again according to the Constitution). Reagan never submitted a balanced budget to the House. If Reagan wanted a balanced budget, why didn't he submit one?
2. Several times, Reagan submitted budgets which spent MORE money than the budgets that were eventually sent back to him by Congress. What was he using, reverse psychology? If he didn't like the budgets sent to him by Congress, why didn't he veto them?
The fact is, deficits went UP under Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle and DOWN under Clinton/Gore . The number of people working for the federal government has gone DOWN under Clinton/Gore and went UP under Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle. I know this completely punctures your world view, but just because you wish it don't make it so.
You don't mandate it. Not everything has to be a law. Point out to the companies that for relatively little work they can put "New Parent-Friendly Viewing History" on their product and market it as the next family-friendly product. Yay free market.
The fact is that it is basically impossible (as I pointed out) to have this read-only history available, so any company promoting it would be lying (and making false claims in ads is illegal).
And Gore wants this to be LAW, just as Bush wants it to be LAW that filtering software is installed on public machines. Suggestion and market forces doesn't enter into it.
When something in the house gets broken like a vase or picture, you don't go fingerprinting the scene and looking for concrete evidence, you ask your kids.
Tell that to the parents who search their kids rooms for drugs and make their kids give urine and hair clippings for testing. There are some scary, scary people clamoring for this stuff.
Besides, I bet that 99 44/100 % of the people on/. saw their first porno magazine before the age of 14. How many did it turn into raving lunatics (the ones who would have been raving lunatics anyway don't count)? I can hear hate speech on the evening news, or read about it in the newspaper. Is anyone protecting their kids from Dan Rather?
When/how did you interpret Bush as regulating speech from his debates?
Because he would install filters on publically-accessible terminals. It's well-known that filtering software doesn't work, and often contains policial biases. People who can't afford their own computers (and yeah, there are people like that out there) would then be stuck with either using publically-paid-for computers that don't show them information, or hoping that some private foundation will either buy them a computer or set up unfiltered publically accessible machines.
Basically, Bush is going to screw the poor, who couldn't kick in any money to buy him the presidency. Somehow, I'm not shocked.
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You don't like capitalism? You don't like people doing things to make money? I'm having a hell of a time finding a gardener who isn't in it for the money. How about coming over and cleaning up my yard for free?
-jon
1. Starship Troopers is NOT fascist. It is, if anything, the opposite of fascism. People have trouble getting this through their heads. It is about why human beings fight. It's a coming of age story. It explores the concepts of what makes a good and a bad government.
Tell me EXACTLY why you think it's fascist. Because the only people who can vote are veterans? First of all, veterans means ANYONE who has completed at least two years in the civil service, not just the military. Secondly, while serving in the civil service, you cannot vote. Finally, you are free to quit your civil service job at any time (except for the military, who can only quit when not actively fighting). How is any of this fascist?
2. Moon is a Harsh Mistress is basically a handbook on how to run a revolution, sorta like the one back in 1776, which is quite clearly referenced. It, once again, is about what makes a good government, and Mike raises all sorts of questions on the nature of being alive.
I'm not going to bother to comment on your comments about Stranger.
-jon
And that's simply not true. If you remove the cost of creation, then distribution and mass production costs predominate. It would be trivial for a large company to steal a novel, song, movie, whatever from a person who works alone and produces something. It's virtually certain that the creator will be screwed and the large company will profit. This is what people refuse to understand: copyright and patent are intended to protect the little guy against the big guy and the tyranny of the masses, not the other way around.
others: Linus Torvalds has a day job and still finds time to direct kernel development, the KDE team is largely made up of people who work for TrollTech, and there are many many sysadmins who Open Source tools they have created to help themselves in their jobs.
Linus started Linux when he was at school. His work for Transmeta is owned by Transmeta, not him. It pays for him to spend time working on Linux. If he didn't get paid by Transmeta, he probably wouldn't be working on Linux.
I'm not sure about TrollTech's funding, but how do they make money? VC funding? How profitable is the company? Companies based on open source are probably long-term doomed.
Sys admins who are contributing stuff done during work hours are technically stealing from their company; it's almost certain that they signed a work contract which stated that anything they create during work hours is company property, and anything RELATED to company work created at any time is owned by the company, too. Just wait until the first lawsuits which try to remove that sort of code from an Open Source project...
If you believe in "Intellectual Property", that's your business, but it doesn't give you the right to denigrate the work of those who believe differently than you. There is not *yet* a law that states that all intellectual activity must be undertaken in service of the profit motive.
If you subsidize your salable creative work with non-creative work, even if you don't enjoy your non-creative work solely because you think it's morally wrong to profit from creative work, you're either a saint or a moron. I can't decide which. If you're doing some creative work for money and some creative work for free, then you're a hypocrite.
-jon
I'm guessing that real radicals like to eat and have shelter. If they are going to give away what they produce for the Greater Good, they have to live off of the money/goods/etc. from other people, and they can get it either by force or the good graces of other people. The second option is wonderful in theory, but the first is more common in practice.
The sole reason why the Open Source movement exists is students and professors who have been living off of parents and/or government grants.
Granted, there are companies which are trying to make money from Open Source projects, but they are trying to profit from obscurity; their products are so hard to use, that people are willing to pay for support. I don't see that happening with books or music any time soon, and when people start putting easy-to-use interfaces on these Open Source products, these companies are sunk.
I've written code in my spare time which I've given away, but if I (or my company) was unable to make money from the code I write for them, I wouldn't be writing code, and I probably wouldn't have the spare time to write code that I give away. As much as I love to code, I love to take care of my family even more.
-jon
What the hell are you talking about? Apple licenced One-Click from Amazon for use in the Apple Store. That's it. If it's a worthless patent (I think it is), then Apple (presumably) paid Amazon for something worthless. It has nothing to do with what you use Darwin for.
So if you want to develop a Free MacOS X, GNUStep is a really good place to start from. I simply hope that by the time MacOS X is released, the headlines will look like "GNUStep: a better MacOS X than MacOS X" :-)
And it's been what, 5-10 years, that work on GNUStep has been going on? How far along is it? Can it do any of the things which separate Mac OS X from NextStep? Will it ever?
I'm not sure how to get this through your pointy little head, but I'll try: Darwin isn't intended as a Linux/[Free|Open|Net]BSD replacement. It's simply the ultimate documentation for the low levels of Mac OS X. If it helps people write better device drivers for Mac OS X, it's a huge win for Apple. If someone can catch a bug in the OS, it's a great thing for everyone. If it lets people run Mac OS X on older hardware, it's a win for customers who don't want to buy new Macs. Intel support might serve as Apple's escape hatch from Motorola's incompetence, but that's still up in the air.
The political rationalle behind "free" software doesn't really enter into Apple's reasons for releasing Darwin, so don't look for one, or even complain about Darwin not being free enough to satisfy you.
-jon
First of all, what's scary about the DoD putting its library on-line?
Second of all, only people who create nothing think that the creative work of others should be free. If copyright holders want to be able to track their work and make sure that their work is only available to people who have acquired a licence, I don't see a problem. In fact, it will be a HUGE help to individual authors/musicians/artists/whatevers, since they can take care of managing distribution all by themselves without needing a big company to handle it. Of course, promotion is still an issue, but that's another debate...
If you want to be a thief, you'll hate this. If you want to actually use the net to find stuff and be reimbursed for the things you create, you'll love it.
-jon
Right now, the best way to do a portable 64 is via emulation. Frodo exists on multiple platforms, and Power64 on the Mac is damn good; it works well enough to run GEOS 2.0. Now if I still had my floppies full of games and a way to get them onto my PowerBook...I miss that 64!
-jon
The installer for Win32 had a checkbox: "Save Selected Components Locally" or something like that. It created a Netscape 6 Setup folder on my machine, which has all the bits it downloaded. Is that what you're talking about?
-jon
Ummmm, no. In 1976, Reagan challenged Ford for the Republican nomination. When Reagan gave an off-the-cuff speech at the nominating convention (when Ford was nominated) there was basically an "Oh, Shit" moment for Republicans, when they realized that Reagan would have made a far better nominee. Ford, of course, went on to lose in 76, and Reagan won in 80 and 84.
-jon
I get the feeling that you think some sort of Lord of the Flies existance is vastly better than 21st century America. Bullshit. If you think so, get your fucking ass off of the web and into the middle of the fucking desert and try to form your perfect anarchist society with all your other anarchist buddies. I bet there isn't a single useful skill among the lot of you.
I give a mindless fucker like you about a week before the buzzards are eating your (admittedly small) brains.
-jon
Jello Biafra is clearly a hypocrite, and the original poster was pointing that out. He hates it when OTHER people tell him how to live his life (and try to control who can listen to his music), but he wants to control other people and tell them how to live their lives (maximum wages, no SUVs, etc). Although I wonder how he intends to enforce any of his wacky ideas if he gets rid of the army and the police...
Yawn. Another fascist in anarchist clothing.
And if your incoherent ramblings are the best arguments a Biafra supporter can muster, it's not too shocking that no one outside of his fellow fascists takes him seriously.
-jon
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mdeniers.html
And I'm always curious: why is it that anti-Semites deny the Holocaust happened? They keep running around, talking about killing Jews; you'd think they'd be proud of what Hitler and his goons did. But no, they deny it happened. Yet, they keep on saying that they'll kill all the Jews, if they get the chance. Odd.
-jon
-jon
It's not a race-based state, but a religion-based state. Entirely different. It's as legal as Vatican City is. Anyone who wants to become a Jew can become a Jew. I've yet to hear of a way for a black person to become white, but science is always improving.
Sounds like there's horrible and pervasive racism still today: "Israel's Apartheid".
And yet the article mentions that there's an Arab justice on the Israeli Supreme Court, that Miss Israel is an Arab, and that the Supreme Court has ruled that anti-Arab discrimination is illegal. Like I said, it's not perfect and there's still discrimination, but it's not like South Africa.
-jon
See, this I don't get. The land of Israel (ignoring the West Bank and Gaza) supports a population of roughly six million, a million of whom are Arabs. In 1948, the population of the part of Palestine which became Israel was WAY under a million. About 300,000 Arabs fled Israel and became refugees. Considering how many people are there now, population pressures wouldn't have forced out those people.
50 year later, there are 3 MILLION people who claim to be refugees. This is an astonishing population growth. It's also crap. My great-grandfather fled Russia to avoid pogroms. Does that mean that all of his descendants are entitled to land in Russia? If so, please tell me how to collect. If it will help me get sympathy, I'll move my family into a tent and throw rocks at Russian troops. Anyone care to bet whether or not they'll use live ammo?
And, of course, if the Arab countries hadn't kicked out so many Jews, then they wouldn't have come to Israel to displace Arabs.
Anyway, it's not like there were no Jews in Palestine, and the one day in 1948, five million showed up and killed any Arabs they found, forcing the rest to flee. There were Jews in Israel at the time of its founding, and there have always been Jews there. Relatively large numbers started to return in the 1880s, but Jews had been in places like Tiberias, Jerusalem, and Hebron for basically forever. It's just that after a couple of thousand years of persecution, it was realized that maybe having a place to call home wouldn't be a bad thing. In short, there wouldn't have been a Jewish homeland if one hadn't been needed.
And they live like blacks used to live in the US and South Africa.
I'm not aware of any "Arab-only" water fountains or lunch counters in Israel, and I don't recall ever hearing about black people holding public office in South Africa or the US when segration was in full force. But I could be wrong.
I'm not saying that life is perfect for Arabs in Israel; there is discrimination, and it's wrong. Israel has certainly taken away land from Arab residents without just compensation, and Arabs are excluded from many things (the army in particular), based on security concerns. But let's keep our facts straight.
The US is who is backing Israel. So their relative ineptitude with PR is not important.
Which is true for now, but I don't think the US is going to be backing Israel in 5-10 years, if things continue the way they are now. Would the US stand up to another oil boycott? Would Americans blame Israel (and Jews in general) for it? I think the answers are fairly obvious. I'm pretty sure that most Americans would give up support for Israel if it would knock a buck off the price of gas. I might be selling people short, but not by much. Maybe two bucks would be the cutoff point, I dunno.
-jon
The Jews have suppressed and taken advantage of the working class time and time again. Currently, they have strong influence in the film industry (MPAA), and in the music industry (RIAA). What will it take to reform them?
Ah. A Jew-hater. Very good. Easy to pick apart.
Since you seem to think that there is no individual Jew, but rather a single, nefarious Jew, I'll talk about it that way.
Isn't it funny how those pesky Jews took advantage of the working class, and yet they wrote the Communist Manifesto (Marx) and founded the CIO (Samuel Gompers). And they hate the poor so much, the evil Jews wrote the poem on the Statue of Liberty (Emma Lazarus). And then there's the evil Einstein Jew, who founded Pugwash.
Those black-hating Jews helped found the NAACP, and its first three presidents were evil, evil Jews.
Selfish Jew Haym Solomon helped fund the American Revolutionary War. Jew organizations like Mazon raise money to feed the hungry (and as I'm sure you'll tell me, all Jews are rich, so obviously there aren't any hungry ones, yet they are raising money for hungry people, and they only raise money for Jews...is your head going to explode?). If you take a look at http://www.ziv.org/ziv_links.html, you'll see a whole page of charities for Selfish Jews, like the one which raises money to keep poor Pakistani children from being used as child labor (but, your feeble mind says, that's helping poor workers AND Muslims! Those dastardly Jews, always trying to cover for themselves!). And those Muslim-hating Jews in Israel were among the first countries to offer support to the Muslim Kosovo refugees, far earlier than any of the Arab nations did.
I could go on and on with examples that refute your stupid bigotry. But hate-filled people like yourself won't listen, and those that understand that your head is filled with straw don't need the examples.
-jon
And they still do. Arabs who didn't run when Israel was founded (either because they thought they'd be killed or because they thought they were regrouping for the final assault to push the Jews into the sea) still live there. Roughly 20% of the Israeli population isn't Jewish. Their freedom of religion is respected and they are able to vote and hold seats in the parliment (in fact, there were 3 Arab members of the first Israeli parliment). The recent problems with Israeli Arabs rioting in support of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is a new phenonmenon.
Oh, and by the by, the holy books of both Christians and Moslems say that the land of Palestine is Jewish land.
Meanwhile you can trace the deed to your property back hundreds of years, documented by authorities established there hundreds of years previously and recognized by the entire world (including the United Nations), the exception being an occupying power making claims to your land in direct violation of international charter and law.
You mean like Yassar Arafat, who was born in Cairo? Or Eduard Said, whose family had left Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel? Strong claims they have there.
And where is the compensation for the Jewish refugees who were kicked out of Arab lands? Just because Israel took care of Jews who were kicked out and didn't leave them to rot in camps like the Arabs did to the Palestinians doesn't mean that the Jews shouldn't be compensated, too.
So, based on this vague notion of history and spurious claim, they kick you out of your flat and, when you join a protest against this action and begin throwing rocks at those you feel are oppressing you, fire bullets into the crowd killing you or some of your fellow protestors, then pat themselves on the back for their "restraint." This, in a context where any civilized country answers rioting and rock throwing with tear gas, water canons, and night-sticks, not machine guns, tanks, and rocket fire.
I take it you aren't aware of the Intifada which ran from the mid-80's to the early 90's. That was mainly rock-throwing children and teens against rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons. There were still deaths, but at a far lower rate than what we're seeing now. The new uprising has people with guns using rock-throwing children as cover. They should be ashamed of themselves. Instead, they bus in more children.
What's going on in Gilo/Beit Jala is more of the same. People who don't even live in Beit Jala are coming there at night, and shooting at Jews in Gilo, hoping to get the Israelis to damage the property and kill the residents of Beit Jala, so the international media will condemn Israel, and the residents of Beit Jala will join the fighting. The Israelis, ham-handed as they are at PR and the like, don't know how to get this story well-publicized and instead act like big bullies by shooting rockets at Beit Jala.
Are the Israelis doing the wrong thing? Yeah, probably. As I said, they don't understand PR. Israel sees itself as an island surrounded by hostiles in a world which has shown time and again that it would like nothing more than to get rid of the Jews. Condemnation by the UN isn't a big deal compared to the fallout from being called Christ-killers for 2,000 years. The Israelis are going to do what will protect themselves the most, and damn the consequences. This is a highly paranoid and stupid strategy which is going to backfire, sooner or later.
But anyone who thinks that all of this fussin' and fightin' is going to be ended if the Israelis just packed up and left the West Bank and Gaza is delusional. The Palestinians aren't going to be satisfied until there isn't a Jew left in the land. If you don't belive me, listen to some of the lovely sermons being given in the mosques, or some of Arafat's speeches when the Western media isn't watching. If Israel doesn't figure out how to get more of the world's opinion on its side, when the time comes that the Palestinians/Arabs do seriously threaten to push the Jews into the sea, the rest of the world is going to sit back and say that they deserve it.
I wish I had a solution to the problem that everyone could agree to, but I don't. But at least get your facts straight before arguing your point.
-jon
This is, of course, anti-Semitic horseshit.
Here is Exodus 21:12-14:
"One who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death, but not if it is unintentional, but God allows it to happen: then I will apoint you a place where he shall flee."
There's nothing there about "Hebrew" or "Israelite" or anything else. It says MAN (which in Hebrew includes the feminine gender). It also includes the concept of unintentional murder, which is vaguely analagous to homicide in American law.
As for the amazingly bloody wars described in the Torah and the rest of the Jewish Bible, they were quite the norm at the time. The Amalakites, for example, are singled out for destruction because rather than attacking the Hebrews head-on (where the men would be), they attacked the rear, where the women, children, and the feeble would be.
Now go crawl back under the rock from whence you came.
-jon
Actually, back in the day, Jobs had about zero business sense, other than the sense that Woz's computer might have a market. It was Mike Markukla (sp?) who was the "suit" to go along with the "geek" (Woz) and the "visionary" (Jobs).
Mike actually hung around on the Apple board until the Great Putsch of 1998, when Jobs retook Apple.
-jon
if this law is passed and MP3.com already has to pay a few cents to record companies for my.mp3.com, will mp3.com be able to stop paying the companies, or since the settlements were made before this law would they stil have to pay
They will probably have to continue paying. The settlement between mp3.com and the RIAA labels is a private contract. If it turns out that mp3.com bought something useless (rights to broadcast music that are free), so be it.
What makes it even more sick is that if mp3.com just says, "screw it, we won't pay the RIAA, because the contract is worthless", they can be sued for breach of contract, and they'll probably lose. Unless there's some sort of escape clause already in the contracts, I dunno.
-jon
You had better believe the 45% loser is looking hard and long at that 8%. Maybe if they had taken a platform that attract that 8% as well, they could have won.
Horsepucky. They'd evaluate if going after that 8% would cost them any of their current support, vs. going after an additional 1% from the winner without losing any of the current support.
Considering the radical differences between the Green platform and the platforms of either the Dems or Repubs, it's highly likely that they'd lose far more current support than they'd gain new support by trying to attract Green followers.
-jon
I don't see any reason why there need to be ANY public access terminals. People can surf porn sites on their own dime.
There should be public access terminals for the same reason there are public libraries and public schools. It is in everyone's best interest that we have an educated populace. Right now, this means exposing them to the Internet, as well as the books in a library and compulsary education until the age of 16.
This is why the school voucher nonsense pisses me off so much. If we want to give money to parents to send their kids to private schools, then fine, do it from some other source of revenue other than the funds targeted towards public education. Or (gasp) raise taxes to pay for vouchers. But taking away from the public schools because your kids aren't going to go there is mean-spirited. Can the childless get voucher money back? And if I promise not to call the police or fire department, can I get my share of their funding back? The death of the concept of the common good is the curse heaped on us by conservatives in the US.
And, no, public terminals shouldn't be used for porn, but I've yet to hear of a system that doesn't throw the baby (non-porn) out with the bathwater (porn), and I don't think it can be done. And if we filter for porn, do we filter for abortion? How long before some cracker starts making noise about the government aiding and abeting abortions because they aren't filtering out information on it?
If you think abortion is too extreme, how about drug legalization? Research on far-out political parties?
-jon
1. According to the Constitution, the President submits a budget to the House of Representatives (where all tax bills must start, once again according to the Constitution). Reagan never submitted a balanced budget to the House. If Reagan wanted a balanced budget, why didn't he submit one?
2. Several times, Reagan submitted budgets which spent MORE money than the budgets that were eventually sent back to him by Congress. What was he using, reverse psychology? If he didn't like the budgets sent to him by Congress, why didn't he veto them?
The fact is, deficits went UP under Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle and DOWN under Clinton/Gore . The number of people working for the federal government has gone DOWN under Clinton/Gore and went UP under Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle. I know this completely punctures your world view, but just because you wish it don't make it so.
-jon
The fact is that it is basically impossible (as I pointed out) to have this read-only history available, so any company promoting it would be lying (and making false claims in ads is illegal).
And Gore wants this to be LAW, just as Bush wants it to be LAW that filtering software is installed on public machines. Suggestion and market forces doesn't enter into it.
When something in the house gets broken like a vase or picture, you don't go fingerprinting the scene and looking for concrete evidence, you ask your kids.
Tell that to the parents who search their kids rooms for drugs and make their kids give urine and hair clippings for testing. There are some scary, scary people clamoring for this stuff.
Besides, I bet that 99 44/100 % of the people on /. saw their first porno magazine before the age of 14. How many did it turn into raving lunatics (the ones who would have been raving lunatics anyway don't count)? I can hear hate speech on the evening news, or read about it in the newspaper. Is anyone protecting their kids from Dan Rather?
-jon
Because he would install filters on publically-accessible terminals. It's well-known that filtering software doesn't work, and often contains policial biases. People who can't afford their own computers (and yeah, there are people like that out there) would then be stuck with either using publically-paid-for computers that don't show them information, or hoping that some private foundation will either buy them a computer or set up unfiltered publically accessible machines.
Basically, Bush is going to screw the poor, who couldn't kick in any money to buy him the presidency. Somehow, I'm not shocked.
-jon