Che, I know that... but who do you think got Norway to do it? Was it a local company, concern or official? No, it was an American company. Like it or not, America has the power to meddle in other countries' affairs quite a bit - sometimes it's bad, like in this case, and other times it's good. And as I've said before, both to Americans and foreigners, it's because it can. Any other country that could would - and have, and do. But this is really a different topic. I said 'American society' for two reasons: 1) It's what I know the best and 2) This is largely an American legal concern. Yes, it'll effect other countries, but it'll be settled one way or another in American courts.
I can't help but think that the DeCSS case in some way represents a turning point in American society, and how it goes will be a prediction of much more important trends. I'd say a pretty factual way to describe it would be hackers versus corporations - a small non-commercial group of people want one thing (Open DVD access) and a megabillion dollar industry is in direct opposition. We know what we want and why we're right, and this is a cause we can back 100% percent. This isn't the Mp3 fight with one highly-IPOed company wrestling with its larger, older competitors or the Kevin Mitnick atrocity of a criminal being caught and unConstituionally punished with mostly script kiddies to back him up against the might of the government. It's not even UCITA with the larger concern of customers (the earlier VCR flap is like this) - be honest, the average Windows user doesn't care about DeCSS like we do - they have DVD access. This is the technological community that's grown in wealth and power by leaps and bounds as our society increases its reliance on computers, on their own, against the corporations, one of the largest power bases in modern American society.
Who's going to win? That's the turning point. Is the corporate combination of money and influence going to destroy our fair-use rights and abuse our programmers to the point of arrest and imprisonment, or are we going to organize effectively enough to become another power base in America and prevent corporate control of our interests and information access? We don't really have any other allies - even when you're right about this, or other major issues, non-involved people are going to say "Oh, that's too bad. Someone should do something about that, but it doesn't really involve me." and turn away. It's not like the geek lobby is going to be electing presidents anytime soon or anything, but there's no reason we can't have our say on society just like say the NRA, NAACP or the ACLU. I'm not necessarily talking about just joining the EFF or whatever, I'm also talking boycott, education and quite possibly protest - electronic and real world. It's also probable that we stay unorganized and unmotivated - voiceless and ineffectual. Which one would you like to see happen?
Don't think you won't make a difference, and don't think that the MPAA will win no matter what you do. The only thing that guarantees the MPAA a victory is everyone thinking so.
I know, I know, this is slightly off-topic, but for all of you out there jonesing for Fallout 1 & 2, both work perfectly fine under Wine. Other people (not in this thread) have said no, but it's possible, just get the latest wine release. Basically, install it under wine (no windows partition needed, either! Wish Kingpin would do that), mount the CD on your wine-mapped CDROM (or just copy it and make a directory that wine maps to for FAST playing) and then run it with your X server at 640x480x8bpp. I beat Fallout without ever installing it on Win9x and now I'm going through Fallout 2 the same way. Sure, occasionally it'll lose sound or crash, but hell, it does the same in Windows!
I wasn't surprised at all when I saw this, because the United Nations (or at least large portions of it) has supported censorship in the past, in direct violation of their own list of human rights.
Apparently, the idea of drug legalization is so abhorrent to the UN and so obviously criminal that anyone who suggests it should be punished. Write a book supporting it? The UN wants your head. A politician realizing how corrupt and pointless this 'war on drugs' is with the guts to tell others the truth? The UN thinks they should be quiet... or go to jail.
or more accurately, Adam Warren dealt with it in his version of the Dirty Pair. I'm forgetting the exact name of the book, but in it Kei and Yuri ("Dirty Pair!" "Lovely Angels!" "Don't deny their exciting nihilistic aspect, dude. Dirty Pair!") go up against someone who's chock full of repair nanites to the point of shrugging off a broken neck. No problem, they just beat him so much the heat of the nanites do more damage than they can repair.
I could see passenger boats carrying a few of these onboard to stick on the heads of those feeling nauseous - after all, if you think you're walking around in whatever virtual world, you'll probably feel better.
I'd pity them if their fear of losing control because of people learning a better way didn't lead to death (Tiannamen) and repression (of political rights and freedom of speech).
So please explain, then. Why the run-around, the legal threat, the impossibly low user level for the FTP, the questionable stock practices, the general lack of fulfillment of grandiose promises?
As it is, anyone who actually thinks your company is anything other than a fraud is a gullible moron. Prove me wrong. I'd love it, actually, to see a company put serious improvements (hopefully GPLd) into Linux, but all proof points to nothing ever coming out of LinuxOne except lawsuits.
In a very early excerpt of 'Cryptonomicon' he addresses the idea of genetic programming. Somebody wanted a program to identify schizophrenic people over the Internet, so they bred programs using their ability to recognize mental disease in conversations. Of course, you can't just hook up patients and have them talk to consoles fast enough, so they also created paranoid programs. It was an interesting excerpt, and he's said it will be in the sequel to Cryptonomicon.
Of course, The Diamond Age also featured evolutionary design - the nanites, remember?
Perhaps a special Quickies is needed, describing the various open-source game projects? Problem is, there's far more projects than can be given space. That's what linuxgames.com is for. But a run down on the major (and code-producing) projects would be a nice idea.
On the other hand, it's not like Slashdot is head over heels on the commercial Linux thing. Yeah, Redhat and SuSE and Caldera and Corel and Debian are all featured, but they're the big ones, the Quakes' of the commercial world so to say. Most smaller distributions get one notice (RTLinux or so) or none.
Chehh... I fail to see how the editor of AOLWatch's comment was in any way showing a bias. It was more an example of a legitimate concern about censorship - if I was running a high volume mailing list dealing with AOL, I wouldn't want it stuck on AOL's spam list due to ideological reasons either. Who knows what else might get censored by AOL through their filters?
While I'll agree that there's a lot of bad journalism, you're pointing at shadows if you call *this* bias. Bias is ignoring the facts or putting an misleading spin on them.
Back when the article about Windows 99 Beer in Germany was published, someone was complaining about how if this had been Linux, Slashdotters would be up in arms about it. Now it's happened again (I wonder what the outcome of the South Korean company was) and people are rightfully pissed.
The difference? The category of trademark. Note that the company has asked for a trademark related to computer services. One assumes they'd try to market themselves as the owner of Linux, confusing people. This is what trademark law was designed to avoid. If they had asked for a trademark related to say a dance company or something, who would care? (NB: The somewhat made-up nature of Linux might make this a little questionable, IANAL - yet. So don't start playing games with Coke or Nike or Microsoft or somebody.) As long as the trademarks are in different fields of use, two companies can have identical names. That's why Windows 99 Beer is perfectly okay.
Agreed -- this is basically what MSN and other ISPs have been doing with their $400 rebates on PCs. I don't necessarily see why this would be more popular than the current offers, but if they can bring down the price...
While it's nice to see Linux in another device, I wonder how successful it's going to be. It sure better be at the low end of that $300-$700 price range. Kick in that monthly cost, which I'm assuming must be a combined ISP/phone bill, and it starts to get expensive while still reasonable. The only problem is, anyone willing to put out $300 for a Internet device might as well buy one of those bargain basement PCs and get the added use of applications and games.
Who knows? They might get clever with the phone combination - perhaps being able to talk on the phone while still online at a lower speed? That would be handy for those of us with one phone line. Or perhaps they could integrate online games into the base unit. But I still feel that unless a company can offer a Web gizmo that's radically different from a PC or well below $200, PCs will continue to be the surfing platform of choice.
Penny Arcade's ragged on UF as well in the strips. Strangely enough, I don't have any problem with their approach but I think Pvp's strips regarding UF were off-base (Illiad, if you actually read the strips, isn't the Linux fanatic straw man of PvP) and the rant was just wrong. Who is he to tell me what's funny or not, especially considering he's made Ultima Online strips? Talk about humor funny only to a few...
Fef. A solution? I'm not that arrogant. I do know that banning divorce would be a horrible idea, though. Once it's become widely acceptable in our society, banning it legally would be incredibly stupid. Anyways, no one should care less about divorce unless there's children involved.
Your analogy is flawed. Mental illness is fundamentally different from physical disease such as cholera and smallpox. There's a large difference between distributing vaccines and probing into people's psyche through therapy or drugs. And perhaps I didn't clearly communicate what I meant by cause and symptom. Our society has problems. (Whose doesn't?) These problems, I feel, are causing increasing mental illness in its members. Depression, anxiety, and even more serious problems. Drug abuse, both illegal and legal (and I include prescription drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac in here too) are another symptom. Dealing with the symptoms is important to avoid positive feedback but it fails to address the core cause, which I'll freely admit I don't know exactly. Anyways, I'm just concerned when I see signs the federal government is becoming more interested with the mental health of everyone: once you can define who needs treatment and who doesn't, and you get to give the treatment, you've got too much power. Ah well. I'm always guilty of the slippery slope fallacy.
What's next? A War On Mental Disease, with all the loss of rights we've seen from all the rest of the government's oh-so-successful domestic wars.
"Don't worry, this psychological profiling is only for your and the nation's good! And of course, the results will be 100% confidential..."
Pah. If our culture is experiencing such a signifcant display of mental illness, I think there's something fundamentally wrong. What can you expect from a nation whose citizens' ambitions are mostly to get stock options and be a celebrity? Anything the government could do will only be trying to cure the aftereffects, not whatever the cause is. Kick in all the broken families (Out of ten friends of mine, only four have parents still married) and I'm personally surprised the results weren't higher, at least in the depression category.
And then when the federal government starts getting interested in helping peoples' mental health - lovely in ideal, and the article seems to suggest they're only going to urge more and cheaper usual treatment which is not bad, but I'm still warey of governmental influence on such a potentially dangerous thing. Remember how the USSR used to declare dissidents mentally ill? And the CIA's MKULTRA brainwashing scandal (techniques are actually very similar to scientologist procedures) wasn't that long ago...
The GPL is really a license for open-source program/documentation development, and nothing more. You don't want 100 different revisions of a fiction text out there, each slightly "improved" by a different author. Can you imagine reading a book, perhaps a chapter at a time, and having it constantly change on you? The plot inconsistencies would make The Phantom Menace look like Shakespeare. I love the GPL, but please, let's be serious about where to use it.
I'm going to have to disagree on both counts. First off, RedHat doesn't have that much money. They may have a sky-high market valuation, but it's not like they have that much cash, or can even turn it into anywhere near that much cash. Furthermore, why should they? If RedHat really wanted to make DVDs work under Linux at any cost, they'd go to the DVD companies, *co-operate* and give incentives, not start a fight they'd probably lose no matter how many lawyers they had. Going into bankruptcy is not a good use of money. RedHat's small compared to the media conglomerates - same deal with the fight against the DMA. If RedHat can spend X million dollars against, just imagine how many millions they can use.
Don't expect companies to perform civil disobedience or be the revolution - that's what individuals are for.
The response from the internet community is certainly nice to see, and the fact that download.com would have the corporate guts to do this is pretty kewl, but be serious! Do you honestly believe the DVD-owning companies think they'll be able to totally eradicate DeCSS from the Internet? No way. Don't set up straw men - as stupid as companies can be, they're not entirely filled with idiots.
However, if they can intimidate its programmers and prevent any future development or related programs, they're happy. This especially goes for the LinuxDVD project - if you really want to stick it to The Man, rather than provide another mirror of DeCSS, which ain't going away any time soon, find some way of helping the LinuxDVD project.
Yeah, but half the reason Linux is hard to operate involves less than stellar hardware compatability. I know Linus has been interested in improving Linux's laptop capability (due to purely selfish reasons, natch) and if this is a new architechure, one would imagine it would require a new, designed-for-Linux bunch of hardware that would be easily supported.
Which if was an independent country, would weigh in at 8th largest economy. Agriculture (especially marijuana, largest cash crop) + Hollywood + SV + Pacific commerce...
Check out the current "The K Chronicles" for something very similar - in return for subsidizing the birth of a child, 21th century companies get to brand and raise them the Coke/Pepsi way - addicts to a drink and its included drug.
Slashdot Mirror
Che, I know that... but who do you think got Norway to do it? Was it a local company, concern or official? No, it was an American company. Like it or not, America has the power to meddle in other countries' affairs quite a bit - sometimes it's bad, like in this case, and other times it's good. And as I've said before, both to Americans and foreigners, it's because it can. Any other country that could would - and have, and do. But this is really a different topic. I said 'American society' for two reasons: 1) It's what I know the best and 2) This is largely an American legal concern. Yes, it'll effect other countries, but it'll be settled one way or another in American courts.
Who's going to win? That's the turning point. Is the corporate combination of money and influence going to destroy our fair-use rights and abuse our programmers to the point of arrest and imprisonment, or are we going to organize effectively enough to become another power base in America and prevent corporate control of our interests and information access? We don't really have any other allies - even when you're right about this, or other major issues, non-involved people are going to say "Oh, that's too bad. Someone should do something about that, but it doesn't really involve me." and turn away. It's not like the geek lobby is going to be electing presidents anytime soon or anything, but there's no reason we can't have our say on society just like say the NRA, NAACP or the ACLU. I'm not necessarily talking about just joining the EFF or whatever, I'm also talking boycott, education and quite possibly protest - electronic and real world. It's also probable that we stay unorganized and unmotivated - voiceless and ineffectual. Which one would you like to see happen?
Don't think you won't make a difference, and don't think that the MPAA will win no matter what you do. The only thing that guarantees the MPAA a victory is everyone thinking so.
I know, I know, this is slightly off-topic, but for all of you out there jonesing for Fallout 1 & 2, both work perfectly fine under Wine. Other people (not in this thread) have said no, but it's possible, just get the latest wine release. Basically, install it under wine (no windows partition needed, either! Wish Kingpin would do that), mount the CD on your wine-mapped CDROM (or just copy it and make a directory that wine maps to for FAST playing) and then run it with your X server at 640x480x8bpp. I beat Fallout without ever installing it on Win9x and now I'm going through Fallout 2 the same way. Sure, occasionally it'll lose sound or crash, but hell, it does the same in Windows!
Apparently, the idea of drug legalization is so abhorrent to the UN and so obviously criminal that anyone who suggests it should be punished. Write a book supporting it? The UN wants your head. A politician realizing how corrupt and pointless this 'war on drugs' is with the guts to tell others the truth? The UN thinks they should be quiet... or go to jail.
You may not agree with this position. Fine. But any decent human being will realize that criminal penalties based on political beliefs and speech is blatantly unfair and a violation of freedom of speech. Background information can be found at this site (information on UN anti-drug laws) and here (more important; a direct look at the censorious SOBs of the UN).
or more accurately, Adam Warren dealt with it in his version of the Dirty Pair. I'm forgetting the exact name of the book, but in it Kei and Yuri ("Dirty Pair!" "Lovely Angels!" "Don't deny their exciting nihilistic aspect, dude. Dirty Pair!") go up against someone who's chock full of repair nanites to the point of shrugging off a broken neck. No problem, they just beat him so much the heat of the nanites do more damage than they can repair.
I could see passenger boats carrying a few of these onboard to stick on the heads of those feeling nauseous - after all, if you think you're walking around in whatever virtual world, you'll probably feel better.
I'd pity them if their fear of losing control because of people learning a better way didn't lead to death (Tiannamen) and repression (of political rights and freedom of speech).
As it is, anyone who actually thinks your company is anything other than a fraud is a gullible moron. Prove me wrong. I'd love it, actually, to see a company put serious improvements (hopefully GPLd) into Linux, but all proof points to nothing ever coming out of LinuxOne except lawsuits.
Of course, The Diamond Age also featured evolutionary design - the nanites, remember?
On the other hand, it's not like Slashdot is head over heels on the commercial Linux thing. Yeah, Redhat and SuSE and Caldera and Corel and Debian are all featured, but they're the big ones, the Quakes' of the commercial world so to say. Most smaller distributions get one notice (RTLinux or so) or none.
Before they even had code, Slashdot posted their call for developers. So the support's there, it's just on a very hit and miss level.
While I'll agree that there's a lot of bad journalism, you're pointing at shadows if you call *this* bias. Bias is ignoring the facts or putting an misleading spin on them.
The difference? The category of trademark. Note that the company has asked for a trademark related to computer services. One assumes they'd try to market themselves as the owner of Linux, confusing people. This is what trademark law was designed to avoid. If they had asked for a trademark related to say a dance company or something, who would care? (NB: The somewhat made-up nature of Linux might make this a little questionable, IANAL - yet. So don't start playing games with Coke or Nike or Microsoft or somebody.) As long as the trademarks are in different fields of use, two companies can have identical names. That's why Windows 99 Beer is perfectly okay.
Agreed -- this is basically what MSN and other ISPs have been doing with their $400 rebates on PCs. I don't necessarily see why this would be more popular than the current offers, but if they can bring down the price...
Who knows? They might get clever with the phone combination - perhaps being able to talk on the phone while still online at a lower speed? That would be handy for those of us with one phone line. Or perhaps they could integrate online games into the base unit. But I still feel that unless a company can offer a Web gizmo that's radically different from a PC or well below $200, PCs will continue to be the surfing platform of choice.
Penny Arcade's ragged on UF as well in the strips. Strangely enough, I don't have any problem with their approach but I think Pvp's strips regarding UF were off-base (Illiad, if you actually read the strips, isn't the Linux fanatic straw man of PvP) and the rant was just wrong. Who is he to tell me what's funny or not, especially considering he's made Ultima Online strips? Talk about humor funny only to a few...
Your analogy is flawed. Mental illness is fundamentally different from physical disease such as cholera and smallpox. There's a large difference between distributing vaccines and probing into people's psyche through therapy or drugs. And perhaps I didn't clearly communicate what I meant by cause and symptom. Our society has problems. (Whose doesn't?) These problems, I feel, are causing increasing mental illness in its members. Depression, anxiety, and even more serious problems. Drug abuse, both illegal and legal (and I include prescription drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac in here too) are another symptom. Dealing with the symptoms is important to avoid positive feedback but it fails to address the core cause, which I'll freely admit I don't know exactly. Anyways, I'm just concerned when I see signs the federal government is becoming more interested with the mental health of everyone: once you can define who needs treatment and who doesn't, and you get to give the treatment, you've got too much power. Ah well. I'm always guilty of the slippery slope fallacy.
"Don't worry, this psychological profiling is only for your and the nation's good! And of course, the results will be 100% confidential..."
Pah. If our culture is experiencing such a signifcant display of mental illness, I think there's something fundamentally wrong. What can you expect from a nation whose citizens' ambitions are mostly to get stock options and be a celebrity? Anything the government could do will only be trying to cure the aftereffects, not whatever the cause is. Kick in all the broken families (Out of ten friends of mine, only four have parents still married) and I'm personally surprised the results weren't higher, at least in the depression category.
And then when the federal government starts getting interested in helping peoples' mental health - lovely in ideal, and the article seems to suggest they're only going to urge more and cheaper usual treatment which is not bad, but I'm still warey of governmental influence on such a potentially dangerous thing. Remember how the USSR used to declare dissidents mentally ill? And the CIA's MKULTRA brainwashing scandal (techniques are actually very similar to scientologist procedures) wasn't that long ago...
The GPL is really a license for open-source program/documentation development, and nothing more. You don't want 100 different revisions of a fiction text out there, each slightly "improved" by a different author. Can you imagine reading a book, perhaps a chapter at a time, and having it constantly change on you? The plot inconsistencies would make The Phantom Menace look like Shakespeare. I love the GPL, but please, let's be serious about where to use it.
Don't expect companies to perform civil disobedience or be the revolution - that's what individuals are for.
However, if they can intimidate its programmers and prevent any future development or related programs, they're happy. This especially goes for the LinuxDVD project - if you really want to stick it to The Man, rather than provide another mirror of DeCSS, which ain't going away any time soon, find some way of helping the LinuxDVD project.
Programs are ephemeral. Source code is forever.
Yeah, but half the reason Linux is hard to operate involves less than stellar hardware compatability. I know Linus has been interested in improving Linux's laptop capability (due to purely selfish reasons, natch) and if this is a new architechure, one would imagine it would require a new, designed-for-Linux bunch of hardware that would be easily supported.
You can do it (Damn Nvidia! Why don't you release an updated libGL.so for Xfree 3.3.5 until XFree 4.0?) but it's slow as a dog.
Which if was an independent country, would weigh in at 8th largest economy. Agriculture (especially marijuana, largest cash crop) + Hollywood + SV + Pacific commerce...
Check out the current "The K Chronicles" for something very similar - in return for subsidizing the birth of a child, 21th century companies get to brand and raise them the Coke/Pepsi way - addicts to a drink and its included drug.