A lot of the best shit out there is from nobody's, and you never would have heard 'em if it weren't for the internet. A lot of them sell =$10 cds to people who only know about them through mp3 (often distributed by the bands/artists themselves)
And that's damn cool. In fact, three of my five favorite bands right now are ones who put their mp3's up.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom? Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Wake up, grow up, and get real. "Because it's legal!" is not sufficient ethical justification to be able to do something.
If you do something that's immoral, why yes, you can be tracked down and held accountable.
That's exactly what's happening to a) mettalica and b) RIAA. Just because it's illegal, that doesn't make it wrong. And just because it's legal, that doesn't make it right. Yeah, people know that a lot of Napster shit going down is illegal. But that doesn't make it wrong or bad. I know for a fact that these are mostly artists that these "pirates" support, except the odd one who downloads ten times as many cds as they'd ever bought, but I only know about one in ten or fifteen like that and believe me I know quite a crowd. And the record companies don't make their cut and they're pissed, but they can eat shit and die. Because we all know they make a living ripping everybody off anyway, and besides this isn't their stuff that they made, not their property, except that often it is as part of some badass contract they get some naive artists roped into.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom? Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Use of analogy in argument is fundamentally flawed because it is like a crack in a block of ice.
Personally, I think the dude's on crack myself. There pretty much isn't any valid argument aside from analogy. Maybe 1% of all logically sound argument consists of something besides analogy.
The universe is one big fractal. And if you don't see things fractally you can't really understand very much. 'cuz it's just too big, it'll blow your mind. But analogy, it allows you to see that things are really the same, even when they're completely, entirely different.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom? Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
And at the same time, I can record the concert across the street and sell it. (if it's outdoors) If they can sell the noises of yelling and screaming of the crowd which they didn't produce I can sell the concert which I didn't produce but just happened to float past. Now this is entirely different from if I was paying to get in, in which case I have to play by their rules and no recording devices are allowed, or if I were to sneak in in which case I don't have a right to be there in the first place. But the law is in the pocket of the music industry anyway so as it ends up any recording I can sell that they don't get a royalty for is illegal.
Slashdot can reprint comments in the book without permission. The book is copyrighted. But I can requote those comments without permission from the book's publishers so your complaints about permissionless republishing are all pretty much moot. If they want to sue me then fine, I know I'll win, unless I get some really half-assed judge. Because they took stuff that was owned by the posters, then so can I from them, just like if Apple can't sue MS for Windows "look and feel" (which they took from Xerox), then MS can't sue KDE.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom? Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Ahh, yes, the fashionable "They went from 800 MHz to 1000 MHz, therefore the must be lying about the 1000 MHz parts" cliche. You will note that the difference between these is 20%.
Actually, the difference is 25%. You measure from the starting point, (200/800) not from the ending point, (200/1000) when measuring percent of increase.
So why do you keep harping on it? Too little technical knowledge to poke holes in the Intel plan?
Why do you keep harping on it? Too little mathematical knoweldge to poke hole in his plan?
Notice that at the time intel came up with a supposed "1GHz" PIII CPU there was no actual native 1GHz PIII CPU but rather an 850MHz PIII (or somesuch) overclocked to 1GHz.
The first OS I used was the BASIC command-line on the TRS-80 "color computer 2". Of course that thing does say (c) Microsoft when you boot it up...
BTW, did you know that on a TRS-80 you could type anything with the first three letters "dir" and it would interpret it as a dir command? i.e. "dire wolf" and "dirty liar!" would both list the files on your disk.
You'd feel good and rewarded if you acheived your goal, wouldn't you? Anyway, forgive me if I implied that you didn't achieve your personal goals, or that the project had failed to meet any of its planned goals: I was proposing that if Stampede had stampeded with users, I think the team would stay together, and I outlined where I think the marketing vision went wrong.
Not if everybody inside thought it all sucked.
I used to work at a restaurant owned by some family friends and it was quite a successful place. But I thought the style of management sucked and I and many others were constantly dissatisfied. Whether or not this restaurant was "stampeding with users" was irrelevant because we were being mismanaged and essentially disconnected from caring about the success or failure of the business we were at. Hell, most of us would be happiest if it had gone out of business so we didn't have to quit.
So if Stampede had been the most successful distro, but most of the people involved felt that they weren't doing what they set out to do, this would still happen.
If you make a mistake that causes someone to be killed,/accidentally/ but it was obviously your fault, you can be charged with involuntary manslaughter and/or reckless endangerment. If you cause somebody to be injured inadvertantly through stupidity or oversight, you can qualify for reckless endangerment.
Leaving a gun lying around where a kid could find it is a "mistake" and the kid finding it is "accidental". But charging the adult for damages has the affect in the future of people thinking "hmmm... maybe I shouldn't leave my gun here" instead of just doing it without thinking. So too with things like leaving a list open--they produced unsolicited mail to 12,000 people, and failed to stop in a timely matter when asked, sustained unsolicited mail being illegal in many states. If they had knowingly subscribed to the list, it would be different. If the list had just contained announcements from ICANN, as it was supposed, it would be different because that would have been solicited by signing up. Now/I don't think legal action makes sense in this case/, and if I were a judge I might throw it out (IANAL but I don't think there are really any precedents for this sort of thing), but chastising them for this mistake makes an example so that hopefully, ppl will be more careful and check whether their lists are open automatically before sending them to people who did not knowingly sign up.
Funny, it seems to me like everyone is complaining about how/. sucks now because of all the moderation, but it's the "screamy teens with nothing better to do" who are getting moderated(down).
It's entirely optional to click on the link. It's not like they're in your mailbox, or in the body of the article. I'm guessing most people don't want to and won't click on the link. I clicked on it because I thought it would be interesting to see what ppl posted, and was rewarded as it was quite funny.
Re:Possible Uses of the Gathered Data
on
Linux on the Brain
·
· Score: 1
Doubtless. I'm holding out for the day when we have embedded chips in which read impulses and then communicate back with direct sensory data.
NASDAQ value fluctuates with how many people decide they want to sell or buy on a particular day--it often has very little to do with how much a company is selling. Witness the dot-coms--incredible stock value inflation for companies making no profit or earnings. The same thing precipitated the great depression. But what causes a stock market crash is when everybody starts selling rabidly.
Now look at VA-all that increase in stock value was due to people zealously buying for a piece of the pie. Then when it peaked a bunch of people started selling figuring they'd got their profits and now it was time to go home, so it dropped a bit. Then the last people to buy before the peak freak out because they are losing money and sell all they've got. So it drops more. So more people freak out because it looks like an unhealthy company, even though the only reason they are losing money is because so many people are deciding they want out and VA is paying them, and now these people all want out dropping the price still further. Repeat ad infinitum, until the company is bankrupt and has 0 remaining shareholders.
If neither Red Hat nor VA had gone public none of this would have happened and they would still be quite financially successful companies.
So the stock market is about as far from the real world as anything can get. Have you taken a finance class or just get your econmic theory from M$ yes-men? Considering you can't spell economic I would say you're in no position to lecture me on economics. And your grammar sucks too.
If it's governed by our fellow readers, how come I don't get to vote? I don't see any buttons or links for "mod this post up" or "mod this post down". I think they're just a core group inside/. who does it.
Not that I know anything, or that that changes my position at all.
Lots of people don't want to read the -1 posts. We had this problem on ticalc.org--everyone was complaining about how long the pages took to load and read because there was so much crap interspersed with the actual discussion, then they started whining their arses off when they started moderating. Most people know whether they want to see the -1 posts or skip them, so it's not like they'e "blindly" leaving their threshold at 1 and following the moderators.
I don't like seeing the -1 posts. I go through them occasionally to see what they say but I don't want them to appear by default because I find them brainless and a waste of my browsing time. If I were to find that posts were modded down for expressing a contraversial point of view, or anything else I don't agree with, I would quit supporting the moderators.
To sum up-I support moderation because they don't abuse it. They save us time without stifling anybody's point of view.
Sure the law isn't perfect, but breaking it to point this out is just childish and immature.
So Martin Luther King was just childish and immature?
Change in the law itself needs to be enacted within the law, otherwise it is little more than throwing tantrums, something which/.ers seem to be quite good at recently.
But if nobody realizes the law is corrupt, how will it get changed? The only way is for people to see ordinary, upstanding citizens like themselves who haven't done anything wrong being arrested. (or killed, or beaten by cops, or whatever)
Look at RMS as a prime example of a so-called "hero" - while/.ers seem to worship him they seem to have a miraculous ability to ignore any flaws in what he says and his arrogrant, elitist attitude.
Funny, because I haven't seen anything positive about RMS on/.. All I have seen about him here is lambasting over his "virus license" and how he wants to screw Taco's mom.
Now, as to whether -1 posts "tend to not be good", I think that's a subjective opinion and I have to disagree. I think it's a travesty that when we revisit archived articles that we lose some important comments. Rob really blew up with that decision.
Well, all the moderation scores are subjective. I think most of the -1 posts really suck. Now, I've never seen anybody marked down for an anti-linux point of view. It's just having "Linux sucks my mom's cock!!" as the entirety of a message is, well, a waste of space. So is "Windows eats shit!!". If they were bundled with some intelligent arguments either way, they would get moded up. In fact, I've never seen anybody marked down for their point of view, period. Now, I can drop my threshold down to -1 and see all of these, but there is only so much space available for archiving and do they really need 100s upon 100s of posts of "I WILL POUR HOT GRITS ON YOU"? It's not really censorship if it is only removal of gratuitous repetitious drivel. It's not stifling a point of view or otherwise used to control people. Besides,/. is only doing you a favor by providing a venue for you to express yourself. They don't have to allow everything you say--you can go elsewhere or host an archive yourself which includes the -1's, using your disk space. It's not because they don't want people to read the -1's, but they don't feel them worth the resources. This is entirely different from the censorship spoken against on this site--It's not saying you can't say anything, or do anything. It's saying you can, but we aren't wasting our time helping you.
Re:Where will it go when they're on top?
on
BeOS For Linux!
·
· Score: 1
But if the core of the technology is open source it doesn't matter who you're talking about. It still depends on developers who also use in order to get development done, rather than financial incentives. More users = more illiterate users = less development per user base. Too much demand for supply. And the more things go commercial the more they are crap because it's more lucrative to play games than to deliver quality technology.
Don't mess with FreeBSD. It has it's place just the way it is, same with all *BSD. Same with Linux and Be. If it were commercialized it wouldn't be FreeBSD anymore--it wouldn't have the qualities that separate it from Linux.
It's like when I recommend distros--I prefer Debian, but I don't figure it's "better" than others or the ultimate distro because different users have different needs. I recommend other distros like Corel or Caldera for my less technically literate friends. Some ppl wish there was only Corel, or that there was only Debian or SUSE, but truthfully what would all the other users do? ------- Great gift idea: Linuxmall pack of 100 CDs assorted distros (Linux and FreeBSD) for $100. Gifts for up to 100 people. (itended for LUGs, but who cares?)
I'm allowed to say "anything I want" according to the 1st ammendment, but I for instance recite a copyrighted work to an audience without the author's permission.
DeCSS is not under copyright, except with the GPL. Just because it theoretically allows copying of copyrighted material, doesn't make it illegal. Furthermore DeCSS really only allows you to play encrypted DVDs. Viewing the source allows you to make a program to copy them, but the source can't be stopped because of this because it is free speech. That's just like banning a photocopier or prohibiting the verbal description of how to use one, because it could be used to duplicate copyrighted material.
Now if DeCSS were copyrighted by MPAA this would be a different story. But it isn't. Or if DeCSS posed a quantifiable "clear and present danger" per se, like a virus, akin to the classic "shouting 'fire' in a crowded room". But it doesn't. Those are the tests speech has to go through for regulation, and it doesn't meet either of them. (sure there's obscenity, but we all know that that's not a truly valid way around the first ammendment or the free speech principle. Besides, who would argue that the DeCSS source code is obscene? It would have to offend the average "reasonable" citizen, who can't tell the difference between source code and the tax code)
1st, you misunderstand what is meant by "wanting to be free". It is simply an idiomatic/metaphorical expression describing the natural progression of information. Look at it in the manner of the Turing test--the information shows all behaviors of wanting to be free, therefore it is indistinguishible functionally from wanting to be free. The only problem is that we humans typically refer to consciousness in such narrow terms.
I don't really care who knows about my "favourite porno movie." People should be able to handle these things in a mature manner--we are human beings, which are members of the animal kingdom, which have carnal desires, deal with it. I regularly have dead serious, completely frank conversations with my friends and even on occasion with complete strangers about things like masturbation, sex dreams, porno movies, ppl we find attractive, whatever in a completely non-titillating way. Now if I lose my job over something out of my last doctor visit, or somebody revealing I watch porno on occasion, well, fuck them. It's a battle I have to fight. People accuse me of being non-realistic. Well, they're the ones living in a dream world, because everything about who they are is fake. Yes my information wants to be free, and if people don't like what they see then deal with it.
As for the Swiss bank account thing, well I wouldn't tell anybody my passwords to my computer accounts, either. But that doesn't mean the information doesn't try to become free any way it can, by my tendency to forget and need to write them down, or ask to be remailed them. Saying it wants to be free and that we ought to help it are two entirely different things. The original saying that it wants to be free was not meant to imply that we ought to help it.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the best shit out there is from nobody's, and you never would have heard 'em if it weren't for the internet. A lot of them sell =$10 cds to people who only know about them through mp3 (often distributed by the bands/artists themselves)
And that's damn cool.
In fact, three of my five favorite bands right now are ones who put their mp3's up.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Wake up, grow up, and get real. "Because it's legal!" is not sufficient ethical justification to be able to do something.
If you do something that's immoral, why yes, you can be tracked down and held accountable.
That's exactly what's happening to a) mettalica and b) RIAA. Just because it's illegal, that doesn't make it wrong. And just because it's legal, that doesn't make it right. Yeah, people know that a lot of Napster shit going down is illegal. But that doesn't make it wrong or bad. I know for a fact that these are mostly artists that these "pirates" support, except the odd one who downloads ten times as many cds as they'd ever bought, but I only know about one in ten or fifteen like that and believe me I know quite a crowd. And the record companies don't make their cut and they're pissed, but they can eat shit and die. Because we all know they make a living ripping everybody off anyway, and besides this isn't their stuff that they made, not their property, except that often it is as part of some badass contract they get some naive artists roped into.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Use of analogy in argument is fundamentally flawed because it is like a crack in a block of ice.
Personally, I think the dude's on crack myself. There pretty much isn't any valid argument aside from analogy. Maybe 1% of all logically sound argument consists of something besides analogy.
The universe is one big fractal. And if you don't see things fractally you can't really understand very much. 'cuz it's just too big, it'll blow your mind. But analogy, it allows you to see that things are really the same, even when they're completely, entirely different.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
And at the same time, I can record the concert across the street and sell it. (if it's outdoors) If they can sell the noises of yelling and screaming of the crowd which they didn't produce I can sell the concert which I didn't produce but just happened to float past. Now this is entirely different from if I was paying to get in, in which case I have to play by their rules and no recording devices are allowed, or if I were to sneak in in which case I don't have a right to be there in the first place. But the law is in the pocket of the music industry anyway so as it ends up any recording I can sell that they don't get a royalty for is illegal.
Slashdot can reprint comments in the book without permission. The book is copyrighted. But I can requote those comments without permission from the book's publishers so your complaints about permissionless republishing are all pretty much moot. If they want to sue me then fine, I know I'll win, unless I get some really half-assed judge. Because they took stuff that was owned by the posters, then so can I from them, just like if Apple can't sue MS for Windows "look and feel" (which they took from Xerox), then MS can't sue KDE.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Ahh, yes, the fashionable "They went from 800 MHz to 1000 MHz, therefore the must be lying about the 1000 MHz parts" cliche. You will note that the difference between these is 20%.
Actually, the difference is 25%. You measure from the starting point, (200/800) not from the ending point, (200/1000) when measuring percent of increase.
So why do you keep harping on it? Too little technical knowledge to poke holes in the Intel plan?
Why do you keep harping on it? Too little mathematical knoweldge to poke hole in his plan?
Notice that at the time intel came up with a supposed "1GHz" PIII CPU there was no actual native 1GHz PIII CPU but rather an 850MHz PIII (or somesuch) overclocked to 1GHz.
...to speak for yourself when all you are talking about is other ppl's preferences.
...to interpret printer http requests and serve web pages to printers. After all, printers need to surf too!!
The first OS I used was the BASIC command-line on the TRS-80 "color computer 2".
Of course that thing does say (c) Microsoft when you boot it up...
BTW, did you know that on a TRS-80 you could type anything with the first three letters "dir" and it would interpret it as a dir command? i.e. "dire wolf" and "dirty liar!" would both list the files on your disk.
You'd feel good and rewarded if you acheived your goal, wouldn't you? Anyway, forgive me if I implied that you didn't achieve your personal goals, or that the project had failed to meet any of its planned goals: I was proposing that if Stampede had stampeded with users, I think the team would stay together, and I outlined where I think the marketing vision went wrong.
Not if everybody inside thought it all sucked.
I used to work at a restaurant owned by some family friends and it was quite a successful place. But I thought the style of management sucked and I and many others were constantly dissatisfied. Whether or not this restaurant was "stampeding with users" was irrelevant because we were being mismanaged and essentially disconnected from caring about the success or failure of the business we were at. Hell, most of us would be happiest if it had gone out of business so we didn't have to quit.
So if Stampede had been the most successful distro, but most of the people involved felt that they weren't doing what they set out to do, this would still happen.
If you make a mistake that causes someone to be killed, /accidentally/ but it was obviously your fault, you can be charged with involuntary manslaughter and/or reckless endangerment. If you cause somebody to be injured inadvertantly through stupidity or oversight, you can qualify for reckless endangerment.
/I don't think legal action makes sense in this case/, and if I were a judge I might throw it out (IANAL but I don't think there are really any precedents for this sort of thing), but chastising them for this mistake makes an example so that hopefully, ppl will be more careful and check whether their lists are open automatically before sending them to people who did not knowingly sign up.
Leaving a gun lying around where a kid could find it is a "mistake" and the kid finding it is "accidental". But charging the adult for damages has the affect in the future of people thinking "hmmm... maybe I shouldn't leave my gun here" instead of just doing it without thinking. So too with things like leaving a list open--they produced unsolicited mail to 12,000 people, and failed to stop in a timely matter when asked, sustained unsolicited mail being illegal in many states. If they had knowingly subscribed to the list, it would be different. If the list had just contained announcements from ICANN, as it was supposed, it would be different because that would have been solicited by signing up. Now
Funny, it seems to me like everyone is complaining about how /. sucks now because of all the moderation, but it's the "screamy teens with nothing better to do" who are getting moderated(down).
It's entirely optional to click on the link. It's not like they're in your mailbox, or in the body of the article.
I'm guessing most people don't want to and won't click on the link. I clicked on it because I thought it would be interesting to see what ppl posted, and was rewarded as it was quite funny.
Doubtless. I'm holding out for the day when we have embedded chips in which read impulses and then communicate back with direct sensory data.
NASDAQ value fluctuates with how many people decide they want to sell or buy on a particular day--it often has very little to do with how much a company is selling. Witness the dot-coms--incredible stock value inflation for companies making no profit or earnings. The same thing precipitated the great depression. But what causes a stock market crash is when everybody starts selling rabidly.
Now look at VA-all that increase in stock value was due to people zealously buying for a piece of the pie. Then when it peaked a bunch of people started selling figuring they'd got their profits and now it was time to go home, so it dropped a bit. Then the last people to buy before the peak freak out because they are losing money and sell all they've got. So it drops more. So more people freak out because it looks like an unhealthy company, even though the only reason they are losing money is because so many people are deciding they want out and VA is paying them, and now these people all want out dropping the price still further. Repeat ad infinitum, until the company is bankrupt and has 0 remaining shareholders.
If neither Red Hat nor VA had gone public none of this would have happened and they would still be quite financially successful companies.
So the stock market is about as far from the real world as anything can get.
Have you taken a finance class or just get your econmic theory from M$ yes-men?
Considering you can't spell economic I would say you're in no position to lecture me on economics. And your grammar sucks too.
So apparently
stock market == real world
Thanks for letting us in on that revelation.
I couldn't fear anyone who replaces letters with numbers and uses the term "H4X0R1NG".
I mean, come on, you could at least say "H4X1NG".
There are even rumors abouot a headless iMac for about $600.
How could there be a headless iMac? Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of putting the monitor and system components in the same box if it were headless?
If it's governed by our fellow readers, how come I don't get to vote? I don't see any buttons or links for "mod this post up" or "mod this post down". I think they're just a core group inside /. who does it.
Not that I know anything, or that that changes my position at all.
Lots of people don't want to read the -1 posts. We had this problem on ticalc.org--everyone was complaining about how long the pages took to load and read because there was so much crap interspersed with the actual discussion, then they started whining their arses off when they started moderating. Most people know whether they want to see the -1 posts or skip them, so it's not like they'e "blindly" leaving their threshold at 1 and following the moderators.
I don't like seeing the -1 posts. I go through them occasionally to see what they say but I don't want them to appear by default because I find them brainless and a waste of my browsing time. If I were to find that posts were modded down for expressing a contraversial point of view, or anything else I don't agree with, I would quit supporting the moderators.
To sum up-I support moderation because they don't abuse it. They save us time without stifling anybody's point of view.
Sure the law isn't perfect, but breaking it to point this out is just childish and immature.
/.ers seem to be quite good at recently.
/.ers seem to worship him they seem to have a miraculous ability to ignore any flaws in what he says and his arrogrant, elitist attitude.
/.. All I have seen about him here is lambasting over his "virus license" and how he wants to screw Taco's mom.
So Martin Luther King was just childish and immature?
Change in the law itself needs to be enacted within the law, otherwise it is little more than throwing tantrums, something which
But if nobody realizes the law is corrupt, how will it get changed? The only way is for people to see ordinary, upstanding citizens like themselves who haven't done anything wrong being arrested. (or killed, or beaten by cops, or whatever)
Look at RMS as a prime example of a so-called "hero" - while
Funny, because I haven't seen anything positive about RMS on
Now, as to whether -1 posts "tend to not be good", I think that's a subjective opinion and I have to disagree. I think it's a travesty that when we revisit archived articles that we lose some important comments. Rob really blew up with that decision.
/. is only doing you a favor by providing a venue for you to express yourself. They don't have to allow everything you say--you can go elsewhere or host an archive yourself which includes the -1's, using your disk space. It's not because they don't want people to read the -1's, but they don't feel them worth the resources. This is entirely different from the censorship spoken against on this site--It's not saying you can't say anything, or do anything. It's saying you can, but we aren't wasting our time helping you.
Well, all the moderation scores are subjective. I think most of the -1 posts really suck. Now, I've never seen anybody marked down for an anti-linux point of view. It's just having "Linux sucks my mom's cock!!" as the entirety of a message is, well, a waste of space. So is "Windows eats shit!!". If they were bundled with some intelligent arguments either way, they would get moded up. In fact, I've never seen anybody marked down for their point of view, period. Now, I can drop my threshold down to -1 and see all of these, but there is only so much space available for archiving and do they really need 100s upon 100s of posts of "I WILL POUR HOT GRITS ON YOU"?
It's not really censorship if it is only removal of gratuitous repetitious drivel. It's not stifling a point of view or otherwise used to control people. Besides,
But if the core of the technology is open source it doesn't matter who you're talking about. It still depends on developers who also use in order to get development done, rather than financial incentives. More users = more illiterate users = less development per user base. Too much demand for supply. And the more things go commercial the more they are crap because it's more lucrative to play games than to deliver quality technology.
Don't mess with FreeBSD. It has it's place just the way it is, same with all *BSD. Same with Linux and Be. If it were commercialized it wouldn't be FreeBSD anymore--it wouldn't have the qualities that separate it from Linux.
It's like when I recommend distros--I prefer Debian, but I don't figure it's "better" than others or the ultimate distro because different users have different needs. I recommend other distros like Corel or Caldera for my less technically literate friends. Some ppl wish there was only Corel, or that there was only Debian or SUSE, but truthfully what would all the other users do?
-------
Great gift idea: Linuxmall pack of 100 CDs assorted distros (Linux and FreeBSD) for $100.
Gifts for up to 100 people. (itended for LUGs, but who cares?)
I'm allowed to say "anything I want" according to the 1st ammendment, but I for instance recite a copyrighted work to an audience without the author's permission.
DeCSS is not under copyright, except with the GPL. Just because it theoretically allows copying of copyrighted material, doesn't make it illegal. Furthermore DeCSS really only allows you to play encrypted DVDs. Viewing the source allows you to make a program to copy them, but the source can't be stopped because of this because it is free speech. That's just like banning a photocopier or prohibiting the verbal description of how to use one, because it could be used to duplicate copyrighted material.
Now if DeCSS were copyrighted by MPAA this would be a different story. But it isn't. Or if DeCSS posed a quantifiable "clear and present danger" per se, like a virus, akin to the classic "shouting 'fire' in a crowded room". But it doesn't. Those are the tests speech has to go through for regulation, and it doesn't meet either of them. (sure there's obscenity, but we all know that that's not a truly valid way around the first ammendment or the free speech principle. Besides, who would argue that the DeCSS source code is obscene? It would have to offend the average "reasonable" citizen, who can't tell the difference between source code and the tax code)
Duh, that's the point. They're doing it on purpose so ppl can't troll "1st" or at least look a lot more stupid when they do b-cuz they're really 8th.
1st, you misunderstand what is meant by "wanting to be free". It is simply an idiomatic/metaphorical expression describing the natural progression of information. Look at it in the manner of the Turing test--the information shows all behaviors of wanting to be free, therefore it is indistinguishible functionally from wanting to be free. The only problem is that we humans typically refer to consciousness in such narrow terms.
I don't really care who knows about my "favourite porno movie." People should be able to handle these things in a mature manner--we are human beings, which are members of the animal kingdom, which have carnal desires, deal with it. I regularly have dead serious, completely frank conversations with my friends and even on occasion with complete strangers about things like masturbation, sex dreams, porno movies, ppl we find attractive, whatever in a completely non-titillating way. Now if I lose my job over something out of my last doctor visit, or somebody revealing I watch porno on occasion, well, fuck them. It's a battle I have to fight. People accuse me of being non-realistic. Well, they're the ones living in a dream world, because everything about who they are is fake. Yes my information wants to be free, and if people don't like what they see then deal with it.
As for the Swiss bank account thing, well I wouldn't tell anybody my passwords to my computer accounts, either. But that doesn't mean the information doesn't try to become free any way it can, by my tendency to forget and need to write them down, or ask to be remailed them. Saying it wants to be free and that we ought to help it are two entirely different things. The original saying that it wants to be free was not meant to imply that we ought to help it.