Yah -- certainly it's possible to make an OS without GNU. The argument isn't that "Linux" distributions somehow must be based mostly on GNU, just that they are.
Those two will probably take 2-5 years to get usable. It's a laudable goal, IMHO.
The GNU contribution to modern Linux systems is huge, but it doesn't warrant Stallman's endless ranting over naming. IMHO, he's burned his bridges sufficiently that it's worth the community's time to sever any ties to me.
Stallman talks like he had this fully functional operating system without a kernel. If by this he means he had some text editors and stuff, sure.
Text editors, command shells, compiler, linker, debugger, C library, standard Unix tools (grep/awk/diff/etc.), gtk, desktop environment (Gnome)... short of X and the kernel, pretty much everything in a modern "Linux" distribution that I at least consider to be part of the OS comes from GNU. Check the man pages for 'printf', 'tar', and such.
So I was writing a simple bit of perl script; being too lazy to do it right, I needed to initialize a hash entry to something that wasn't undef, but would never match what would actually be stored there later. A moment's thought, and I decided that "BOOBIESBOOBIESBOOBIES" was pretty unlikely ever to show up in real-life use.
So the client runs the thing, only there are no brzzps to be fingled in one particular section. So when it prints the report, guess what shows up?
Processed 0 of 0 offical changes. Change summary to follow. ------ BOOBIESBOOBIESBOOBIES
Fascinating -- it's a lengthy diatribe about the Kyoto protocol (which I never mentioned in the comment you're replying to.) Okay, we can change the subject.
Kyoto was meant to do two things:
1) Hurt the US economically compared to Europe, by hitting us harder
The US currently emits about 25% of the world's CO2.
2) Provide a start to a process that would have required drastic cuts in CO2 emissions - cuts that would have been politically impossible if called for in the first treaty, but cuts that would be necessary to achieve Kyoto's goals.
"Politically impossible" doesn't mean it's a bad idea. The people making it politically impossible are, in fact, the problem in this situation.
The ultimate conceit in Kyoto was its assumption that its CO2 emissions rules could be maintained, world wide, for 100 years. That requires an absurd faith in the stability of international life that is unprecedented in history.
Look -- there's nobody here, right now, except us. The people who are on the planet right now have a responsibility to do what they can to keep it in a livable state for humans, to the best of our ability, with the poor tools and inaccurate foresight we have at our disposal. Do you think there's a single climate scientist that doesn't wish we could just figure out what's right, sign an agreement, and forget about it for the next thousand years?
This business about 100 years; what the fuck? You're assuming that we can just ignore this problem, because anything we do about it will be destroyed by "the future," and anyway we'll have new technology then and stuff? This isn't a technological problem; according to currently available science, we will encounter significant difficulties as a species unless we cut CO2 emissions (check the sidebar on PDF page 94, document page 89; it's very succinct.) We can do that now; as you rightly point out, the problem is political and societal -- it's difficult to get people (in this case the Bush administration) to agree to cut CO2 emissions, and so humanity will suffer.
Care to back that up? The Dept. of Energy says we emitted 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon via CO2 emissions in 1999.
This site puts us at the top of global carbon emitters. I don't recognize any of ucsusa's members' names, but their figures for the US approximately agree with the DOE's; I see no reason not to trust them.
Re:How To Focus a VGA connected LCD
on
LCD Price Fixing?
·
· Score: 1
Thank you! My monitor is now defuzzed. Slashdot is truly a source of wisdom. You have, in all honesty, saved me a hundred bucks or so for a new video card. Thank you.
(BTW, on my system, 'X' brings up the checkerboard; 'xinit' just starts X normally.)
Even this is somewhat high; Dell has 17"ers for $450 and 18"ers for $600 (plus shipping & tax, maybe $50 for both.)
I am not a Dell shill.
I just bought an 1800fp from them, and overall it's very good (good enough that I feel the need to talk about it at length:-). My only complaints: Plan on getting a DVI video card; I was unable to find a way to run it on a VGA cable that didn't leave wierd zones of slight fuzziness on the screen (tolerable but annoying.) If you want to turn it vertically (which I highly recommend), check out how this works with your card beforehand -- the X driver for the first card I tried (i810) was simply unable to do this, and the second (nv) runs completely unacclerated when sideways, which leaves me with 1980's-X-style click/wait/response interaction at times. Windows users may have better luck; I'm not sure.
Since "sweatshop" is a completely meaningless, derogatory term, Nike is being honest when they say they don't have any-- even if liberals say they do.
This is exactly the same situation as Nike saying "We make fine quality shoes" and liberals suing them because they insist their shoes are not fine quality and that Nike was deceptive in claiming they were.
Simply incorrect -- Kasky pointed to what he claimed were factual inaccuracies in Nike's statements. To wit:
The complaint alleges that, in the course of this public relations campaign, Nike made a series of six misrepresentations regarding its labor practices: (1) "that workers who make NIKE products are . . . not subjected to corporal punishment and/or sexual abuse;" (2) "that NIKE products are made in accordance with applicable governmental laws and regulations governing wages and hours;" (3) "that NIKE products are made in accordance with applicable laws and regulations governing health and safety conditions;" (4) "that NIKE pays average line-workers double-the-minimum wage in Southeast Asia;" (5) "that workers who produce NIKE products receive free meals and health care;" and (6) "that NIKE guarantees a ' living wage' for all workers who make NIKE products." In addition, the complaint alleges that NIKE made the false claim that the Young report proves that it "is doing a good job and ' operating morally.' "
And on the sweatshop thing-- the liberals hate sweatshops because they hate the poor. They'd ratehr that someone who makes $5 a day sewing shoes for Nike be reduced to making $1 a day scavaging rusted cans, or whatever....
Because Liberals apparently never took economics.
This is kind of tangential to the central question -- whether Nike should be allowed to baldly lie in press releases -- but what the hell. I took econ. Here's how I see the situation: World labor is a buyer's market. The world has a copious supply of misery, poverty, starvation, and need. That means that when corporations go shopping for labor, it doesn't take much searching to find a land so destitute that people will beg to work for twelve hours a day in a toxic cess. There are so many poor countries, in fact, that only the really wretched ones get blessed with factories, and even they have to lower their expectations significantly (this is referred to as "racing to the bottom.")
Now the demand for labor is roughly inelastic -- Nike isn't just going to fold up and stop making shoes if it suddenly has to pay its workers a living wage; it'll just make less of a profit, and the rusted can scavenger you're so concerned about will make more money, which was what you wanted, right?
Recognition of the imbalance in the labor market (there are many more workers than companies seeking employees, and so competition on the worker's side is fiercer) guides American labor laws, which prevent workers from working for slave wages or in toxic factories even if they "want to" (i.e. are being forced to by market conditions) -- these policies don't ignore economics; in fact, they recognize and correct economic realities which you're ignoring.
you're trying to shut me up, just like liberals always do
I honestly have no idea what to make of this business about "liberals." Can you please give me an example of a liberal viewpoint that is correct, i.e. one that you agree with?
If you can't, which do you think is more likely: (a) That the liberals have managed to arrive reliably at the wrong answer to every problem they have ever been presented with, or (b) that something else is going on?
The issue for me as an architect (I have written IETF, W3C and OASIS standards)
Well, bloody well good for you. Might I suggest that the standards process should be designed for the good of users and developers and not to make the architect's job easy?
If I need to get an IP owner to donate their property for the common good my job is easiest if I have to ask for as little as is necessary for the particular purpose.
Okay, let's dispense with this "IP" business. What you're saying, in terms of modern technology realpolitik, is that company X tricked the USPTO into granting them a patent on some technique that any half-smart grad student would have come up with in fifteen minutes, and it's causing you grief because the same technique would be useful in the web standard you're drafting. The process of begging X for permission to encode multibyte characters in ASCII will go more smoothly if you can avoid impacting X's revenue stream of lawyering productive technology companies to death, and you really don't give a shit about any of this GPL stuff.
So you cut your deal with the "owner" of the "IP," and come up with a web standard which is impossible to implement in GPLed software. I have to confess, I'm mystified as to why the FSF would be upset about any part of this process, much less your part in it.
The FSF reading on the situation is 100% about their ideology and has nothing to do with real needs as far as I am concerned. Open Source software is not imune to the patent system. If you modify any open source software sufficiently you will run into a patent infringement.
If you apply the FSF "logic" you would have to stop distributing gzip because someone could modify it so that it infringed the Unisys LZ patents.
Bear with me: One of the terms of the GPL is that code licensed under it has to be freely redistributable -- you can't take GPLed code, modify it, and sell it to someone else under "GPL plus Bob's license" terms, where Bob's license allows him to come over and root through your fridge whenever you redistribute the software. In order for the GPL to have any meaning, there can't be any extra restrictions placed atop it -- and, as you point out, free software is indeed subject to patent restrictions like everything else. Hence, patented code has extra restrictions -- hence it's incompatible with the GPL unless it's completely royalty-free. In fact, this is exactly why it's not okay to sling around copies of gzip which include LZW (even if you've gotten special permission from Unisys to do just that) -- patent law forbids free-use rights to the recipients, but you have to grant those rights by the GPL, so you can't distribute the modified gzip at all.
At the end of the day the IP policy is utterly irrelevant since nobody is going to use the specification unless the IP terms are acceptable
So why would you, as a celebrated author of standards for the veritable trifecta of IETF, W3C, and OASIS, even consider including patent-encumbered technologies in a standard? Obviously people are going to use the patent-encumbered standard -- witness the popularity of mp3s -- and the only people who are going to be upset are those goddamned hippies who use Leenox. Which brings us, approximately, to where things actually stand.
The last thing W3C needs to do at this stage is to reopen the IP issue with the membership.
I heartily agree. "If it's wrong, leave it wrong," I always say.
The radical growth of the Internet has been achieved largely because of the freedom of its developers to use the tools they felt necessary to implement the services that have become standards.
Joe: Hey Hank, watch my service compress voice traffic using mpeg technology!
Hank: No, no, Joe! Don't do that!
(Richard Stallman bursts through the wall of the office, ten feet tall and snarling viciously)
Stallman: Who did it? Who's the dirty cur who's putting patented technologies into web services on my internet?
... etc. etc. I'm sure you can see the fallacy: the developers are, as always, free to walk the minefield of patented technologies if that's what they want to do -- it's just that nobody should be forced to do so, which is exactly the situation which exists when an officially sanctioned standard includes techniques which can't be legally used in some circumstances.
Free Software is great and all, but true freedom comes from not handing control of everything to one faction...
Err... yes, that's it, I see... if we let free software implement web standards legally, then the OSS "faction" will... seize control, or... like the Bolsheviks... uh, could you explain it again?
It's important because, time and time again, this sort of pedantry has morphed over the years into an enormous deal. There was a pretty bitter battle a few years back over gzip; many people wanted to use LZW, a patent-encumbered compression technology, because it was good and easy, and it was in use all over the place. "The patent doesn't matter," they said, "For Christ's sake, they use LZW in GIFs." Others were extremely concerned about the legal implications this might have down the road; fortunately, the pedants won, and years later when Unisys started firing around lawsuits left and right, GNU/Linux companies did not find themselves on the receiving end of any of them. There are a few other examples, but in general it is now agreed that it is a Very Good Thing for free software to be compliant with the letter of patent law.
Unfortunately, web software which uses patented techniques simply can't be free software; its code cannot be redistributed without restriction. I think the thing the FSF is most afraid of is that people will implement patented techniques in GPLed web software and Not Worry About It. That would be bad. One scenario I can imagine is this: A developer sues a GNU/Linux vendor for royalties on his patent-encumbered web software, because the GPL can't be applied to patent-encumbered software, and hence the vendor is redistributing it without a license. Technically, the developer is correct.
It seems you don't care much whether free software is available; fair enough. I like having free software, though, and so the situation where (a) technology X is a widely-used standard (web or otherwise), and (b) it is illegal to write free software which implements technology X, seems as odious to me as it does to the FSF.
I would tend to oppose the use of a standard in which the specification is GPL'd
Bzzt -- there's no such thing as a specification that's GPLed, or at least I've never seen such a beast. Your post isn't very clear, but it seems you believe that the FSF is trying to promote standards that permit only GPLed implementations -- which isn't even close to what's going on.
The W3C has adopted a limp-wristed patent policy which would allow a patented technology X into web standards, so long as it was licensed for free use within the context of the relevant web technologies -- but no one, not even commercial entities, would be able to write software which imitated X outside the realm of the WWW. That's bad for everybody except the lawyers.
The only thing this even has to do with the GPL is that the GPL can't be applied to software which is restricted by patents in this way.
All of which, in my (paranoid?) mind, adds up to the US's playing very fast and loose with international law (what else is new?)
This isn't even close to "very" fast and loose; once you enter a country, you're bound by the decisions of local gov't/law enforcement; if they decide to arrest you because you once had the wrong kind of haircut in your home country, they can.
... or turn off animated GIFs. My personal favorite is the ad that says, "If this banner is flashing, YOU ARE A WINNER! Click here!" It doesn't flash for me. It seems I'm not a winner.
You still can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre.
You know what the source for this is, right?
Oliver Wendall Holmes thought that ditributing pamphlets opposing US involvement in WWI (widely regarded by current historians as a stupid war) and encouraging people to resist the draft via legal means was not free speech, because (mumble mumble) crowded theatre (mumble) national security. It was, in my view, a markedly poor decision.
It just shows that those who blithely put all Republicans into one stereotype are undereducated.
Indeed -- the fact that this is unusual is indicative of the disgusting state of politics in the US. If someone's political views are down-the-line identical to the "official" view of the Democrats, Republicans, or what-have-you, you're looking at a situation where:
(a) They've thought the issues through thoroughly, and just happened to agree with the party line on gun control, abortion, economics, welfare, civil rights, and a bunch more.
(b) They lie about their beliefs when they disagree with their party.
(c) They haven't thought about it at all, and are just agreeing with their team without assistance from logic or fact.
I think (c) is the most common by far.
Re:Am I missing something?
on
Film Gimp
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· Score: 2
"New restrictions on content" doesn't have much to do with piracy per se -- if you look at comments like the ones attached to this story, you'll see that the Slashdot hivemind is at least grudgingly supportive of genuine anti-piracy measures.
The problem is that the things the MPAA is asking for basically amount to a ban on general-purpose computers -- open source software, in particular, is incompatible with a scheme under which it's impossible to copy or view certain data, which is what they want (and in a wide variety of digital devices, not just GP computers.) Seen in this light, the more the movie studios grow to rely on free software, the better.
Re:Open source gives studios a headache
on
Film Gimp
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When you're working on a multi-million dollar project, the last thing you want is legal liablity because some Joe stuck some patented or copywritten code into the module you use on the movie. With proprietary code, the guy selling the software takes the legal heat for mistakes like that. With open source, you're on your own.
Curious. By what logic would the end-user of a Free product be liable for such a situation?
Check out "Colloidal Silver: Risk without benefit" for a representative sample of the medical community's opinion of colloidal silver. I myself have been using nothing at all on external wounds/infections, and that's worked quite well for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah -- certainly it's possible to make an OS without GNU. The argument isn't that "Linux" distributions somehow must be based mostly on GNU, just that they are.
From www.gnome.org:
From www.gtk.org:
Great! Let us know when you're done.
Text editors, command shells, compiler, linker, debugger, C library, standard Unix tools (grep/awk/diff/etc.), gtk, desktop environment (Gnome)... short of X and the kernel, pretty much everything in a modern "Linux" distribution that I at least consider to be part of the OS comes from GNU. Check the man pages for 'printf', 'tar', and such.
So I was writing a simple bit of perl script; being too lazy to do it right, I needed to initialize a hash entry to something that wasn't undef, but would never match what would actually be stored there later. A moment's thought, and I decided that "BOOBIESBOOBIESBOOBIES" was pretty unlikely ever to show up in real-life use.
So the client runs the thing, only there are no brzzps to be fingled in one particular section. So when it prints the report, guess what shows up?
Processed 0 of 0 offical changes.
Change summary to follow.
------
BOOBIESBOOBIESBOOBIES
The US currently emits about 25% of the world's CO2.
"Politically impossible" doesn't mean it's a bad idea. The people making it politically impossible are, in fact, the problem in this situation.
Look -- there's nobody here, right now, except us. The people who are on the planet right now have a responsibility to do what they can to keep it in a livable state for humans, to the best of our ability, with the poor tools and inaccurate foresight we have at our disposal. Do you think there's a single climate scientist that doesn't wish we could just figure out what's right, sign an agreement, and forget about it for the next thousand years?
This business about 100 years; what the fuck? You're assuming that we can just ignore this problem, because anything we do about it will be destroyed by "the future," and anyway we'll have new technology then and stuff? This isn't a technological problem; according to currently available science, we will encounter significant difficulties as a species unless we cut CO2 emissions (check the sidebar on PDF page 94, document page 89; it's very succinct.) We can do that now; as you rightly point out, the problem is political and societal -- it's difficult to get people (in this case the Bush administration) to agree to cut CO2 emissions, and so humanity will suffer.
Links?
Care to back that up? The Dept. of Energy says we emitted 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon via CO2 emissions in 1999.
This site puts us at the top of global carbon emitters. I don't recognize any of ucsusa's members' names, but their figures for the US approximately agree with the DOE's; I see no reason not to trust them.
Thank you! My monitor is now defuzzed. Slashdot is truly a source of wisdom. You have, in all honesty, saved me a hundred bucks or so for a new video card. Thank you.
(BTW, on my system, 'X' brings up the checkerboard; 'xinit' just starts X normally.)
Even this is somewhat high; Dell has 17"ers for $450 and 18"ers for $600 (plus shipping & tax, maybe $50 for both.)
:-). My only complaints: Plan on getting a DVI video card; I was unable to find a way to run it on a VGA cable that didn't leave wierd zones of slight fuzziness on the screen (tolerable but annoying.) If you want to turn it vertically (which I highly recommend), check out how this works with your card beforehand -- the X driver for the first card I tried (i810) was simply unable to do this, and the second (nv) runs completely unacclerated when sideways, which leaves me with 1980's-X-style click/wait/response interaction at times. Windows users may have better luck; I'm not sure.
I am not a Dell shill.
I just bought an 1800fp from them, and overall it's very good (good enough that I feel the need to talk about it at length
Try The manager FAQ
Simply incorrect -- Kasky pointed to what he claimed were factual inaccuracies in Nike's statements. To wit:
This is kind of tangential to the central question -- whether Nike should be allowed to baldly lie in press releases -- but what the hell. I took econ. Here's how I see the situation: World labor is a buyer's market. The world has a copious supply of misery, poverty, starvation, and need. That means that when corporations go shopping for labor, it doesn't take much searching to find a land so destitute that people will beg to work for twelve hours a day in a toxic cess. There are so many poor countries, in fact, that only the really wretched ones get blessed with factories, and even they have to lower their expectations significantly (this is referred to as "racing to the bottom.")
Now the demand for labor is roughly inelastic -- Nike isn't just going to fold up and stop making shoes if it suddenly has to pay its workers a living wage; it'll just make less of a profit, and the rusted can scavenger you're so concerned about will make more money, which was what you wanted, right?
Recognition of the imbalance in the labor market (there are many more workers than companies seeking employees, and so competition on the worker's side is fiercer) guides American labor laws, which prevent workers from working for slave wages or in toxic factories even if they "want to" (i.e. are being forced to by market conditions) -- these policies don't ignore economics; in fact, they recognize and correct economic realities which you're ignoring.
I honestly have no idea what to make of this business about "liberals." Can you please give me an example of a liberal viewpoint that is correct, i.e. one that you agree with?
If you can't, which do you think is more likely: (a) That the liberals have managed to arrive reliably at the wrong answer to every problem they have ever been presented with, or (b) that something else is going on?
If (b), what?
Well, bloody well good for you. Might I suggest that the standards process should be designed for the good of users and developers and not to make the architect's job easy?
Okay, let's dispense with this "IP" business. What you're saying, in terms of modern technology realpolitik, is that company X tricked the USPTO into granting them a patent on some technique that any half-smart grad student would have come up with in fifteen minutes, and it's causing you grief because the same technique would be useful in the web standard you're drafting. The process of begging X for permission to encode multibyte characters in ASCII will go more smoothly if you can avoid impacting X's revenue stream of lawyering productive technology companies to death, and you really don't give a shit about any of this GPL stuff.
So you cut your deal with the "owner" of the "IP," and come up with a web standard which is impossible to implement in GPLed software. I have to confess, I'm mystified as to why the FSF would be upset about any part of this process, much less your part in it.
Bear with me: One of the terms of the GPL is that code licensed under it has to be freely redistributable -- you can't take GPLed code, modify it, and sell it to someone else under "GPL plus Bob's license" terms, where Bob's license allows him to come over and root through your fridge whenever you redistribute the software. In order for the GPL to have any meaning, there can't be any extra restrictions placed atop it -- and, as you point out, free software is indeed subject to patent restrictions like everything else. Hence, patented code has extra restrictions -- hence it's incompatible with the GPL unless it's completely royalty-free. In fact, this is exactly why it's not okay to sling around copies of gzip which include LZW (even if you've gotten special permission from Unisys to do just that) -- patent law forbids free-use rights to the recipients, but you have to grant those rights by the GPL, so you can't distribute the modified gzip at all.
So why would you, as a celebrated author of standards for the veritable trifecta of IETF, W3C, and OASIS, even consider including patent-encumbered technologies in a standard? Obviously people are going to use the patent-encumbered standard -- witness the popularity of mp3s -- and the only people who are going to be upset are those goddamned hippies who use Leenox. Which brings us, approximately, to where things actually stand.
I heartily agree. "If it's wrong, leave it wrong," I always say.
Joe: Hey Hank, watch my service compress voice traffic using mpeg technology!
Hank: No, no, Joe! Don't do that!
(Richard Stallman bursts through the wall of the office, ten feet tall and snarling viciously)
Stallman: Who did it? Who's the dirty cur who's putting patented technologies into web services on my internet?
Err... yes, that's it, I see... if we let free software implement web standards legally, then the OSS "faction" will... seize control, or
It's important because, time and time again, this sort of pedantry has morphed over the years into an enormous deal. There was a pretty bitter battle a few years back over gzip; many people wanted to use LZW, a patent-encumbered compression technology, because it was good and easy, and it was in use all over the place. "The patent doesn't matter," they said, "For Christ's sake, they use LZW in GIFs." Others were extremely concerned about the legal implications this might have down the road; fortunately, the pedants won, and years later when Unisys started firing around lawsuits left and right, GNU/Linux companies did not find themselves on the receiving end of any of them. There are a few other examples, but in general it is now agreed that it is a Very Good Thing for free software to be compliant with the letter of patent law.
Unfortunately, web software which uses patented techniques simply can't be free software; its code cannot be redistributed without restriction. I think the thing the FSF is most afraid of is that people will implement patented techniques in GPLed web software and Not Worry About It. That would be bad. One scenario I can imagine is this: A developer sues a GNU/Linux vendor for royalties on his patent-encumbered web software, because the GPL can't be applied to patent-encumbered software, and hence the vendor is redistributing it without a license. Technically, the developer is correct.
It seems you don't care much whether free software is available; fair enough. I like having free software, though, and so the situation where (a) technology X is a widely-used standard (web or otherwise), and (b) it is illegal to write free software which implements technology X, seems as odious to me as it does to the FSF.
Bzzt -- there's no such thing as a specification that's GPLed, or at least I've never seen such a beast. Your post isn't very clear, but it seems you believe that the FSF is trying to promote standards that permit only GPLed implementations -- which isn't even close to what's going on.
The W3C has adopted a limp-wristed patent policy which would allow a patented technology X into web standards, so long as it was licensed for free use within the context of the relevant web technologies -- but no one, not even commercial entities, would be able to write software which imitated X outside the realm of the WWW. That's bad for everybody except the lawyers.
The only thing this even has to do with the GPL is that the GPL can't be applied to software which is restricted by patents in this way.
This isn't even close to "very" fast and loose; once you enter a country, you're bound by the decisions of local gov't/law enforcement; if they decide to arrest you because you once had the wrong kind of haircut in your home country, they can.
Compare this to, for example, the US gov't trying to overthrow the government of Venezuela because they have the wrong kind of oil policy.
As someone pointed out another comment, Steve Ballmer has said that MS will try to squash free implementations with their patents.
You know what the source for this is, right?
Oliver Wendall Holmes thought that ditributing pamphlets opposing US involvement in WWI (widely regarded by current historians as a stupid war) and encouraging people to resist the draft via legal means was not free speech, because (mumble mumble) crowded theatre (mumble) national security. It was, in my view, a markedly poor decision.
Indeed -- the fact that this is unusual is indicative of the disgusting state of politics in the US. If someone's political views are down-the-line identical to the "official" view of the Democrats, Republicans, or what-have-you, you're looking at a situation where:
(a) They've thought the issues through thoroughly, and just happened to agree with the party line on gun control, abortion, economics, welfare, civil rights, and a bunch more.
(b) They lie about their beliefs when they disagree with their party.
(c) They haven't thought about it at all, and are just agreeing with their team without assistance from logic or fact.
I think (c) is the most common by far.
"New restrictions on content" doesn't have much to do with piracy per se -- if you look at comments like the ones attached to this story, you'll see that the Slashdot hivemind is at least grudgingly supportive of genuine anti-piracy measures.
The problem is that the things the MPAA is asking for basically amount to a ban on general-purpose computers -- open source software, in particular, is incompatible with a scheme under which it's impossible to copy or view certain data, which is what they want (and in a wide variety of digital devices, not just GP computers.) Seen in this light, the more the movie studios grow to rely on free software, the better.
Curious. By what logic would the end-user of a Free product be liable for such a situation?
Check out "Colloidal Silver: Risk without benefit" for a representative sample of the medical community's opinion of colloidal silver. I myself have been using nothing at all on external wounds/infections, and that's worked quite well for me.
Indeed. Once I've washed the bacteria off my hands and down the drain, they can do whatever they bloody well like.