I can't imagine how cool Bruce Campbell would be in the role, but he would be a breath of fresh air. As evidenced by shows like Law and Order, replacing a central character with a new one with a different personality is usually more interesting than trying to replace the character with someone similar. Bruce Campbell has been on the X-Files before, and has even played a tightly wound detective on Homicide: Life on the Street, and his experience in the 'horror' genre would make him perfect, the only loss being his trademark sense of humour, which is snotty and loud, unlike Mulder who is more restrained. I should be honest, I'm a huge Campbell fan, and I loved Army of Darkness, but I don't think I'm being biased, Bruce could save the X-Files, and maybe rekindle the sense of wonder it used to have. Don't get me wrong, it was a great show, but too many 'dream' and unresolved plotlines doesn't make for satisfying viewing. I think a little "sugar" from Bruce Campbell would be a great thing.
I agree with you, but like any drug, taking them improperly is bad for you. As for ethanol, my exact words were drug users and alcohol abusers. I was being specific.
I didn't say I like alcohol, I said I've loosened up on PEOPLE who use things. If you've ever met a 16 year old straight edge kid, they're militant, and judgemental. I'm not. My friends drink, do drugs etc, but I don't pester them.
On the subject of drugs, I should start by mentioning that I spent a great deal of my life Straight Edge. Meaning, no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no meat, no cheese etc. In later years I have loosened up on alcohol, but drugs is something I still will not touch.
So perhaps I can take a somewhat outsider perspective on the drug war. First of all, anyone who claims marijuana has no ill effects has never walked into a university dorm. I know it does have effects. But, so does alcohol. So does red meat.
The governments of Canada and the US both feel, for some ridiculous reason that they have a duty to protect us from ourselves. We may have liberty, but we're not given the credit to make decisions for ourselves. Is that freedom?
Point being, drugs may be bad for your brain. I don't think many people will disagree. But what I need to know, what is the arbitrary decider that makes marijuana more dangerous (Reefer Madness!) than alcohol? I've never seen a stoned individual beat his wife, or drive his car into a group of people. On the other hand, we've heard of alcohol-influenced wife-abuse and drunk drivers.
I have no interest in partaking in legal or illegal marijuana, but I don't support states throwing people with personal use marijuana in prison for 20 years, while Budweiser's customers are applauded as "Real Americans/Canadians etc."
I don't like either drug users, or alcohol abusers, particularly, but freedom is not about liking people, it's about allowing everyone the freedom to do as they will, as long as they don't infringe on others rights.
On a side note, Straight Edge kids in Syracuse NY are branded are terrorists. Many are investigated. Somehow, NOT drinking is a crime in the United States. Not eating meat is a crime, but alcohol abuse is as American as Apple Pie.
If you read through the FAQ, you'll notice that Indrema has an architecture for playing DVD's on their DV Linux. Now, using the following assumptions: (1) The encryption stuff is binary-only, and they have (what they claim) is a safe way to show the stream without 'progmatic' access to it. (2) Their box is x86, mine is x86 (3) They also mention that it's fully based on X. (4) It's DVD Video on Linux (!) They could easily sell the DVD portion to desktop users as well. I understand that everyone is supposed to hate DVD's, but I love my movies, and I'd love to be able to run Linux on my notebook AND watch my DVDs. All politics and DeCSS stuff aside, this could be a Good Thing(tm).
You're right. But I think alienating the 13-17 crowd would kill ICQ's bread and butter. Most of their users are high school kids, as far as I can tell... which makes me wonder about why I always get spammed with porn when I make the mistake of loading up that thing.
Remember, this is not the same as the Core fiasco. Strictly speaking, anything like ICQ which provides not only communications and reveals things like IP addresses, can be construed as privacy invasion. Simply speaking, children under 13 cannot legally waive these rights. AOL is only covering itself from a lawsuit, in the case of a pedophile or someone else arranging a meeting. I don't think it's an afront on freedoms, but I'm over thirteen, so maybe I'm biased. I would think AOL and ICQ would be covered by common carrier priveledge in the case of a lawsuit, but American's are so sue-happy that someone will end up suing them anyway.
So, in essence, if I replace all the parts above the kernel (i.e. the windowing system) with X, I'll be able to customize it as easily as Linux? Explain how this is different from using, say Linux or FreeBSD. The ONLY thing that Mac OS X has to offer is applications, and once we replace the windowing system, what's the advantage of Mac OS X? Themes =! true customizability. Just because I can make the widgets look different doesn't change the interface paradigm I'm using. By the way, calling this FUD is the most knee-jerk reaction I've ever seen. If you disagree, fine, but don't write off something as FUD because you don't like it.
I have to disagree with this quite vehemently. Not because I love Linux (which I do) or because I hate the MacOS X (which I don't). But the author seems to be assuming that OS'es are a one-size-fits-all-trust-us-we-know-what's-best-for -you deal. Number one, Mac OS X might look nice, it might even have some nice technology, but you're still stuck under the thumbs of people who think that an operating system should limit you to what they think you should do. You can run Apache, yes. Even bash, zsh, tcsh, I'm sure. But that's not what customization means. As a desktop OS, Linux shines because, given a little time, it can be customized to suit your environment better than any closed OS. At my workplace, my team of programmers uses exclusively FreeBSD and Linux. We're at least 5 times faster than the market at delivering products. Why? Because we know how to customize our systems for what we're doing. Finally, just because Apple released a portion of the kernel under an pseudo-open source licence, doesn't mean that it's free for us to do what we will. The windowing system is still locked down, and we're still expected to fit into the desktop paradigm, that Apple's UI people have come up with. With Linux, some people run Gnome, some KDE, some Enlightenment, etc. etc. This is freedom. This is thinking outside the box. MacOS X is a box. Would we honestly want to be stuck inside one?
See, it works like this. Company A, let's call them Compaq reads something about this whole Open Source thing. They see a few things. First, a bunch of people to fix bugs in something they can't be bothered to fix, and they don't lose ownership. They just make up some horribly restrictive license ala Microsoft's Kerberos, and invite people to fix bugs for free, all the while claiming ownership of all things that come from it.
Now, admittedly, I haven't seen the license, but ten to one says this company acts like every faux-open source bandwagoneers that release code simply for marketing and to exploit a group of people who actually like to help each other.
The question is, we like writing free software for each other, because someone will return the favour and often we're scratching our mutual itches. On the other hand, are we helping anyone but the pseudo-oss'ers by fixing their bugs for free, and getting next to nothing out of it?
This is so typical. Misleading statistics by bargain-basement statisticians confusing causation with correlation. To assume that there is only ONE cause for declining sales is pure stupidity. To put it another way, CD sales were down this year, and coincedentally, the price of tea in China also declined. Clearly, the price of tea in China is having a negative effect on CD sales. This is clearly a stupid argument, but it's not far removed from the one made by these so-called researchers. There is a difference between a cause and a coincedence.
I was wondering if someone more aware could let me know where to send bug reports. For some reason, it doesn't seem logical to flood Linus with bug reports, but without joining the kernel mailing lists, how can we post bug reports?
Before everyone starts attacking MySQL, and citing Oracle's technical merits, we should probably note one thing. First and foremost, Oracle has hideously high pricing. Currently, my company is looking into Oracle licenses to replace our PostgreSQL setup and the nice fellow at Oracle tells me about a "great deal" in which I'll be paying per clock cycle. I.e. 500mhz means 500 * (rate). This is since of course, web sites only use one user to access the database, making licensing fairly cheap. PostgreSQL on the other hand is probably the most "free" of the major RDBMS, provides next to all of Oracle's features, plus some unique features like 'snapshoting' as opposed to row or table locking, sequences and more.
All in all PostgreSQL, speed considerations aside, is a worthy option for people considering Oracle. The only reason most people consider Oracle is because of it's reputation. People hear "Oracle" and they believe you're taking your data seriously.
For speed, MySQL's only advantage is SELECT speed, as INSERT's are quite slow, in comparison. If you're running a website that's fairly non-interactive (like mine : Punknews.org) You'll be happier with MySQL for speed, but if you're dealing with a lot of user-inputted Data, PostgreSQL will make up for the SELECT speed with a much faster, multi-threaded and non-table locking INSERT and UPDATE.
I'm wondering what happened to the next Dirk Gently book, Salmon of Doubt which was expected over a year ago. And what, besides the web site (which I'm sure is a lot of work) are you up to these days. Finally, what else can we hope to see from you in the future?
I see, so in your mind, frivolous lawsuits are as important as genuine ones. You are exactly the same type of person who probably thinks suing McDonald's for burning yourself is a Good Thing. In fact, you are specifically what is wrong with Americans. Also, the communist-nonsense you shot at me is a load of garbage. Believing that the courts shouldn't waste time on frivolous lawsuits is not communist. Perhaps you should read some Marx, grow up and come back here when you grasp some basic english. I'm embarrassed that you're a Canadian.
This type of frivolous lawsuit is completely detrimental creativity. There may be a correlation between violence and video games, but even that does not, in any way, equal causation. I could just as easily mention that it rained here in Toronto, and that prices of pizza went up in China. The two seem unrelated, but statistically, there is a correlation. However, it doesn't take much to conclude that the rain didn't cause the pizza prices to change. The problem is that the individuals who were both victims and agressors in this case refuse to acknowledge that it wasn't something as trivial as movies or video games, but a greater pervasive problem throughout a society. You want a focus group? Try Canada. We recieve the same movies, video games, and much of our culture is related. Clearly, the media is not to blame. I could theorize about the lack of guns in Canada, or our less liberal view of hunting for children, but that would just bring out the gun-nuts. I'm more concerned with showing what isn't the cause - the media - not placing the easy blame.
Remember, you can get the source from ftp.mozilla.org and compile it for whatever you want. Don't complain just because Netscape's preview doesn't support the MIPS processor released in 1985 that you just can't part with, just go, compile and be happy. Is running./configure && make reallu that difficult?
Well, as of FrontPage 2000, the protocol being used is (supposed to be) WebDAV, which is open. Also, my favourite editor, Scite (http://www.scintilla.org/) has a lot of support for ASP, in highlighting. So you could probably hack together a mixture of scite and sitecopy to clone Interdev.
I bought this issue of Wired (I hardly buy it anymore, it's nothing but ads and faux-geek news) thinking that I'd see something of interest, and while the article does have some good points, it tends to drag on, with Bill seeming to remind us at various points what a big smart guy he is. Not that he's incorrect for doing so, but the article is not unlike the so many painfully philosophical, but barely practical articles frequently written about The Future(tm), by the aforementioned big smart guys.
Also, please don't point out that vi isn't the Linux Text Editor, I'm sure the outraged users of alternate 'nixes will be just fine.
I'll be moderated down for this, as are all views which don't seem to match the general consensus. But a great majority of patents are not filed for enforcement. Generally, patents are filed to prevent a competitor from doing it first. If you believe that companies who patent are evil, you're being naive. It's part of modern business, just like the endless lawsuits, and other related nonsense, but you can live, in disbelief, and post to Slashdot comments about how Amazon is patenting air, or whatever else, but perhaps you need to run a company that competes globally and see that it is probably the only safe way to protect yourself. If you don't patent it first, someone else will, and sue you into oblivion.
I agree that this is ridiculous. The witchhunt has no basis in legality. Is it a patent? No. If it was, it would be published, but using it would be illegal. On the other hand, if it's a trade secret, there are no provisions to protect it once it's out. On the other hand, someone could, in theory use DeCSS to copy a movie into MPG or ASF format. The quality would suck though, so it's not really an issue. After all, no one has really made a fortune copying CDs onto cassettes, because of the quality and feature loss.
Good Omens is a just plain brilliant book. And you can't tell me that Kevin Smith didn't read a little of it when he wrote the script for his excellent Dogma (they both deal with similar 'heavy' religious subject matter, in a light-hearted manner) The book itself is nothing like Sandman, if that's what you're used to from Gaimen, it reads more like Douglas Adams, with the peculiar sort of humour that seems so silly, but so damn funny. If you haven't read it yet, you're missing out. That said, I think the director (even Terry Gilliam) has his work cut out for him.
You appear to have figured out that Slashdot runs stories in a similar vein. A few weeks ago, someone congratulated themselves for noticing that Linux gets mentioned a lot. Now you've figured out that Trademarks and IP are an issue. Good for you.
I don't really give a damn why something is opened, as long as it is, with a fairly liberal license. It's just nice to see the code, regardless of the motivation.... Though, I think the argument could be made that file formats should by their nature be open standards.... it's self-crippling to have closed file-formats...
I can understand that we're all rightfully pissed off about this, but let's be honest. LinuxOne isn't planning on selling shares to institutional traders or reasonably enlightened people. The majority of people on Slashdot won't buy into this one, but you're not the market they're after. We've ripped their SEC filing apart, the company, etc., but it doesn't matter... what's going to frustrate us is that lot's of people are going to invest their money, and get screwed. Professional traders didn't inflate VA Linux to $299 at the open, that was day traders, and day traders are the ones getting screwed here too.... personally, I don't care too much, it bugs me that these criminals will make so much money, but day traders are exactly what is wrong with our market right now, and the correction is going to slaughter them. This is just a preview.
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I can't imagine how cool Bruce Campbell would be in the role, but he would be a breath of fresh air. As evidenced by shows like Law and Order, replacing a central character with a new one with a different personality is usually more interesting than trying to replace the character with someone similar.
Bruce Campbell has been on the X-Files before, and has even played a tightly wound detective on Homicide: Life on the Street, and his experience in the 'horror' genre would make him perfect, the only loss being his trademark sense of humour, which is snotty and loud, unlike Mulder who is more restrained.
I should be honest, I'm a huge Campbell fan, and I loved Army of Darkness, but I don't think I'm being biased, Bruce could save the X-Files, and maybe rekindle the sense of wonder it used to have. Don't get me wrong, it was a great show, but too many 'dream' and unresolved plotlines doesn't make for satisfying viewing. I think a little "sugar" from Bruce Campbell would be a great thing.
I agree with you, but like any drug, taking them improperly is bad for you. As for ethanol, my exact words were drug users and alcohol abusers. I was being specific.
I didn't say I like alcohol, I said I've loosened up on PEOPLE who use things. If you've ever met a 16 year old straight edge kid, they're militant, and judgemental. I'm not. My friends drink, do drugs etc, but I don't pester them.
On the subject of drugs, I should start by mentioning that I spent a great deal of my life Straight Edge. Meaning, no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no meat, no cheese etc. In later years I have loosened up on alcohol, but drugs is something I still will not touch.
So perhaps I can take a somewhat outsider perspective on the drug war. First of all, anyone who claims marijuana has no ill effects has never walked into a university dorm. I know it does have effects. But, so does alcohol. So does red meat.
The governments of Canada and the US both feel, for some ridiculous reason that they have a duty to protect us from ourselves. We may have liberty, but we're not given the credit to make decisions for ourselves. Is that freedom?
Point being, drugs may be bad for your brain. I don't think many people will disagree. But what I need to know, what is the arbitrary decider that makes marijuana more dangerous (Reefer Madness!) than alcohol? I've never seen a stoned individual beat his wife, or drive his car into a group of people. On the other hand, we've heard of alcohol-influenced wife-abuse and drunk drivers.
I have no interest in partaking in legal or illegal marijuana, but I don't support states throwing people with personal use marijuana in prison for 20 years, while Budweiser's customers are applauded as "Real Americans/Canadians etc."
I don't like either drug users, or alcohol abusers, particularly, but freedom is not about liking people, it's about allowing everyone the freedom to do as they will, as long as they don't infringe on others rights.
On a side note, Straight Edge kids in Syracuse NY are branded are terrorists. Many are investigated. Somehow, NOT drinking is a crime in the United States. Not eating meat is a crime, but alcohol abuse is as American as Apple Pie.
If you read through the FAQ, you'll notice that Indrema has an architecture for playing DVD's on their DV Linux. Now, using the following assumptions:
(1) The encryption stuff is binary-only, and they have (what they claim) is a safe way to show the stream without 'progmatic' access to it.
(2) Their box is x86, mine is x86
(3) They also mention that it's fully based on X.
(4) It's DVD Video on Linux (!)
They could easily sell the DVD portion to desktop users as well. I understand that everyone is supposed to hate DVD's, but I love my movies, and I'd love to be able to run Linux on my notebook AND watch my DVDs.
All politics and DeCSS stuff aside, this could be a Good Thing(tm).
You're right. But I think alienating the 13-17 crowd would kill ICQ's bread and butter. Most of their users are high school kids, as far as I can tell... which makes me wonder about why I always get spammed with porn when I make the mistake of loading up that thing.
Remember, this is not the same as the Core fiasco. Strictly speaking, anything like ICQ which provides not only communications and reveals things like IP addresses, can be construed as privacy invasion. Simply speaking, children under 13 cannot legally waive these rights. AOL is only covering itself from a lawsuit, in the case of a pedophile or someone else arranging a meeting. I don't think it's an afront on freedoms, but I'm over thirteen, so maybe I'm biased.
I would think AOL and ICQ would be covered by common carrier priveledge in the case of a lawsuit, but American's are so sue-happy that someone will end up suing them anyway.
So, in essence, if I replace all the parts above the kernel (i.e. the windowing system) with X, I'll be able to customize it as easily as Linux? Explain how this is different from using, say Linux or FreeBSD. The ONLY thing that Mac OS X has to offer is applications, and once we replace the windowing system, what's the advantage of Mac OS X?
Themes =! true customizability. Just because I can make the widgets look different doesn't change the interface paradigm I'm using.
By the way, calling this FUD is the most knee-jerk reaction I've ever seen. If you disagree, fine, but don't write off something as FUD because you don't like it.
I have to disagree with this quite vehemently. Not because I love Linux (which I do) or because I hate the MacOS X (which I don't). But the author seems to be assuming that OS'es are a one-size-fits-all-trust-us-we-know-what's-best-for -you deal.
Number one, Mac OS X might look nice, it might even have some nice technology, but you're still stuck under the thumbs of people who think that an operating system should limit you to what they think you should do.
You can run Apache, yes. Even bash, zsh, tcsh, I'm sure. But that's not what customization means. As a desktop OS, Linux shines because, given a little time, it can be customized to suit your environment better than any closed OS. At my workplace, my team of programmers uses exclusively FreeBSD and Linux. We're at least 5 times faster than the market at delivering products. Why? Because we know how to customize our systems for what we're doing.
Finally, just because Apple released a portion of the kernel under an pseudo-open source licence, doesn't mean that it's free for us to do what we will. The windowing system is still locked down, and we're still expected to fit into the desktop paradigm, that Apple's UI people have come up with.
With Linux, some people run Gnome, some KDE, some Enlightenment, etc. etc. This is freedom. This is thinking outside the box. MacOS X is a box.
Would we honestly want to be stuck inside one?
See, it works like this. Company A, let's call them Compaq reads something about this whole Open Source thing. They see a few things. First, a bunch of people to fix bugs in something they can't be bothered to fix, and they don't lose ownership. They just make up some horribly restrictive license ala Microsoft's Kerberos, and invite people to fix bugs for free, all the while claiming ownership of all things that come from it.
Now, admittedly, I haven't seen the license, but ten to one says this company acts like every faux-open source bandwagoneers that release code simply for marketing and to exploit a group of people who actually like to help each other.
The question is, we like writing free software for each other, because someone will return the favour and often we're scratching our mutual itches. On the other hand, are we helping anyone but the pseudo-oss'ers by fixing their bugs for free, and getting next to nothing out of it?
This is so typical. Misleading statistics by bargain-basement statisticians confusing causation with correlation. To assume that there is only ONE cause for declining sales is pure stupidity.
To put it another way, CD sales were down this year, and coincedentally, the price of tea in China also declined. Clearly, the price of tea in China is having a negative effect on CD sales.
This is clearly a stupid argument, but it's not far removed from the one made by these so-called researchers. There is a difference between a cause and a coincedence.
I was wondering if someone more aware could let me know where to send bug reports. For some reason, it doesn't seem logical to flood Linus with bug reports, but without joining the kernel mailing lists, how can we post bug reports?
Before everyone starts attacking MySQL, and citing Oracle's technical merits, we should probably note one thing. First and foremost, Oracle has hideously high pricing. Currently, my company is looking into Oracle licenses to replace our PostgreSQL setup and the nice fellow at Oracle tells me about a "great deal" in which I'll be paying per clock cycle. I.e. 500mhz means 500 * (rate). This is since of course, web sites only use one user to access the database, making licensing fairly cheap. PostgreSQL on the other hand is probably the most "free" of the major RDBMS, provides next to all of Oracle's features, plus some unique features like 'snapshoting' as opposed to row or table locking, sequences and more.
All in all PostgreSQL, speed considerations aside, is a worthy option for people considering Oracle. The only reason most people consider Oracle is because of it's reputation. People hear "Oracle" and they believe you're taking your data seriously.
For speed, MySQL's only advantage is SELECT speed, as INSERT's are quite slow, in comparison. If you're running a website that's fairly non-interactive (like mine : Punknews.org) You'll be happier with MySQL for speed, but if you're dealing with a lot of user-inputted Data, PostgreSQL will make up for the SELECT speed with a much faster, multi-threaded and non-table locking INSERT and UPDATE.
I'm wondering what happened to the next Dirk Gently book, Salmon of Doubt which was expected over a year ago. And what, besides the web site (which I'm sure is a lot of work) are you up to these days. Finally, what else can we hope to see from you in the future?
I see, so in your mind, frivolous lawsuits are as important as genuine ones. You are exactly the same type of person who probably thinks suing McDonald's for burning yourself is a Good Thing. In fact, you are specifically what is wrong with Americans.
Also, the communist-nonsense you shot at me is a load of garbage. Believing that the courts shouldn't waste time on frivolous lawsuits is not communist. Perhaps you should read some Marx, grow up and come back here when you grasp some basic english.
I'm embarrassed that you're a Canadian.
This type of frivolous lawsuit is completely detrimental creativity. There may be a correlation between violence and video games, but even that does not, in any way, equal causation. I could just as easily mention that it rained here in Toronto, and that prices of pizza went up in China. The two seem unrelated, but statistically, there is a correlation. However, it doesn't take much to conclude that the rain didn't cause the pizza prices to change.
The problem is that the individuals who were both victims and agressors in this case refuse to acknowledge that it wasn't something as trivial as movies or video games, but a greater pervasive problem throughout a society.
You want a focus group? Try Canada. We recieve the same movies, video games, and much of our culture is related. Clearly, the media is not to blame.
I could theorize about the lack of guns in Canada, or our less liberal view of hunting for children, but that would just bring out the gun-nuts. I'm more concerned with showing what isn't the cause - the media - not placing the easy blame.
Remember, you can get the source from ftp.mozilla.org and compile it for whatever you want. Don't complain just because Netscape's preview doesn't support the MIPS processor released in 1985 that you just can't part with, just go, compile and be happy. Is running ./configure && make reallu that difficult?
Well, as of FrontPage 2000, the protocol being used is (supposed to be) WebDAV, which is open. Also, my favourite editor, Scite (http://www.scintilla.org/) has a lot of support for ASP, in highlighting. So you could probably hack together a mixture of scite and sitecopy to clone Interdev.
I bought this issue of Wired (I hardly buy it anymore, it's nothing but ads and faux-geek news) thinking that I'd see something of interest, and while the article does have some good points, it tends to drag on, with Bill seeming to remind us at various points what a big smart guy he is. Not that he's incorrect for doing so, but the article is not unlike the so many painfully philosophical, but barely practical articles frequently written about The Future(tm), by the aforementioned big smart guys.
Also, please don't point out that vi isn't the Linux Text Editor, I'm sure the outraged users of alternate 'nixes will be just fine.
I'll be moderated down for this, as are all views which don't seem to match the general consensus. But a great majority of patents are not filed for enforcement. Generally, patents are filed to prevent a competitor from doing it first. If you believe that companies who patent are evil, you're being naive. It's part of modern business, just like the endless lawsuits, and other related nonsense, but you can live, in disbelief, and post to Slashdot comments about how Amazon is patenting air, or whatever else, but perhaps you need to run a company that competes globally and see that it is probably the only safe way to protect yourself.
If you don't patent it first, someone else will, and sue you into oblivion.
I agree that this is ridiculous. The witchhunt has no basis in legality. Is it a patent? No. If it was, it would be published, but using it would be illegal. On the other hand, if it's a trade secret, there are no provisions to protect it once it's out.
On the other hand, someone could, in theory use DeCSS to copy a movie into MPG or ASF format. The quality would suck though, so it's not really an issue. After all, no one has really made a fortune copying CDs onto cassettes, because of the quality and feature loss.
Good Omens is a just plain brilliant book. And you can't tell me that Kevin Smith didn't read a little of it when he wrote the script for his excellent Dogma (they both deal with similar 'heavy' religious subject matter, in a light-hearted manner) The book itself is nothing like Sandman, if that's what you're used to from Gaimen, it reads more like Douglas Adams, with the peculiar sort of humour that seems so silly, but so damn funny. If you haven't read it yet, you're missing out. That said, I think the director (even Terry Gilliam) has his work cut out for him.
You appear to have figured out that Slashdot runs stories in a similar vein. A few weeks ago, someone congratulated themselves for noticing that Linux gets mentioned a lot. Now you've figured out that Trademarks and IP are an issue. Good for you.
I don't really give a damn why something is opened, as long as it is, with a fairly liberal license. It's just nice to see the code, regardless of the motivation.... Though, I think the argument could be made that file formats should by their nature be open standards.... it's self-crippling to have closed file-formats...
I can understand that we're all rightfully pissed off about this, but let's be honest. LinuxOne isn't planning on selling shares to institutional traders or reasonably enlightened people.
The majority of people on Slashdot won't buy into this one, but you're not the market they're after. We've ripped their SEC filing apart, the company, etc., but it doesn't matter... what's going to frustrate us is that lot's of people are going to invest their money, and get screwed.
Professional traders didn't inflate VA Linux to $299 at the open, that was day traders, and day traders are the ones getting screwed here too.... personally, I don't care too much, it bugs me that these criminals will make so much money, but day traders are exactly what is wrong with our market right now, and the correction is going to slaughter them. This is just a preview.