For an actual response to the question... like many others have said, I assume you were doing this for money, not for free, right? If it's for money, then I don't see any problem. They get what they want (their network fixed), you get what you want (to be paid), everyone's happy.
If, OTOH, your ex-boss was demanding that you donate your time and effort for free, then I can't see any reason not to just laugh in her face.
Re:Except they're not, if you had RTFA
on
Ebay vs. Musician
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· Score: 1
The GPL is based on copyright, which is applied to any creative work automatically as soon as it's created.
Shrinkwrap licenses, OTOH, are based on contract law. One common aspect of contract law is that a contract must be mutually agreed on by both parties: it must be signed, by two people (sometimes more).
There is no signature involved in a shrinkwrap license. Heck, with the "Terms of Use" agreements that are becoming popular on many Web sites (like, "By viewing any part of this site, you agree not to link to us without prior written permission" and other such bullshit), there's no assurance that the other party has even read the thing.
This has also been at issue in certain software licenses... there have been ones that could be installed in various ways that didn't involve having to see the license.
... if he's going to slag off the tech community like this, I see no reason why I should become one. Seriously, does he really think that saying "My record sales suck because my fans are all pirates" is going to win him any points?
However, that being said... this is also a wake-up call for the tech community. The mere fact that Moby thinks he can get away with saying this kind of stuff tells me that the RIAA/MPAA's public-relations smear campaign to portray all computer people as pirates is winning. This is not good.
Note also that the editors at Launch took his theory seriously, and printed it up as plain news.
We need to do some public-opinion shaping of our own, and fast. If we keep letting the music companies dominate the discussion, we're toast.
Unless there's some kind of interface for the user, it seems like this could only be used to accept incoming calls. I can't imagine how you'd tell it to dial somewhere -- there can't be any room for a keypad, and it would probably feel incredibly weird if there was one. Sure, you could do weird things like clacking your teeth together in Morse Code or something, but I think that would be a really annoying way to have to dial. Besides, then couldn't it get accidentally triggered while you were eating?
It sounds like a really interesting back-end technology, but until there's a decent UI, it will not be ready for the market.
> i'm not aware of any pedestrians being run over by a computer being used by some kid.
You mean you've never heard of some poor innocent person getting DDoSed halfway to eternity... by a bunch of Winboxen on cable modem hookups, that had been cracked by skr1pt kiddies?
Heck, Yahoo got knocked flat by DDoS. And where did the skript kidZ get the systems they used for it? Simple: those systems were left wide open by people just like the ones that are causing the questioner so much grief: people who will download any virus-laden executable they can get their hands on.
On a global network, one person's insecure box is everyone else's potential attacker.
When I worked for a game company we deliberately did things to make people play them longer. We made the graphics look nicer, we tinkered with rules to make it challenging without being too hard, we hired people to do a nicer sound track. In short we attempted to make it more fun. [emphasis added]
Well, I should hope so! I don't think anyone would want to buy a game, or any other form of entertainment, made by people who deliberately tried to make it less fun.
Which, I think, is the whole point here. Of course Sony tries to make EQ as fun as possible -- that's the whole business of an entertainment provider. But I don't think that means they're "trying to get people addicted to it", and I certainly don't think it can be held against them. (Heck, if they deliberately made EQ less fun, their stockholders would come after them in a big hurry...)
>There's nothing in Mandrake stopping you from downloading tarballs,
>figuring out your dependencies, compiling, etc.
>
>If you want to be leet with Mandrake, feel free...
Actually, I'm doing a Mandrake install today (and I just figured out why I can't get to their Web site for docs!). I'm trying to do something at least a little l33t, namely set/bin,/sbin, and/lib up as their own partitions and mount them read-only.
DrakX doesn't like that. Despite the fact that I told it at the beginning that I wanted to do an "Expert" install, and despite being in expert mode in the disk partitioning utility, every time I tell it I want to make a partition mount at/bin (or any of those directories), it gives me an error message saying that directory should be on the root partition.
Software that arrogantly claims it knows better than I, the human, do is one of the things I hate about many Windows programs. I don't mind if it goes, "Hey, that's kind of weird. Are you sure you want to do that?", and gives me a button or check box that says, "Yes, I really do want to do that."
But when it says, "No, no, you don't want to do that!" -- and doesn't give me any way to insist that I'm damn well going to do it anyway, because I'm the human and the computer is there for me, not the other way around -- well, that's when I get really annoyed with a piece of software.
...subcutaneous computers. If the miniaturization trend keeps going this way, I figure ten years from now, we'll be able to pack a CPU, RAM and HD inside your body, with no ill effects.
Now, if we can just get a workable interface for that, it'll actually mean something. Without the interface, it's pretty pointless. As someone said, "imagine trying to type on that."
"No sound?" No way! It should play Also Sprach Zarathustra as its startup sound!
And some kind of eerie wailing noise would be canonical, from the scene on the Moon. Maybe it should just do that around sunrise (and maybe sunset)?
No Inconsistency in Preferring Open Standards
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Borking Outlook Express
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· Score: 5, Interesting
>Its ok to say "Use anything except outlook" when
>you are on the linux side.
>
>What would you say, if I said use a program that
>can read Word docs [slashdot.org]??
The point about these anti-Outlook headers is that they're still perfectly conformant with RFCs 821, 822, et al. Any conformant mail-reader can read these messages just fine.
But there is no RFC for Word.doc format. In either case, the underlying message is "use a mail client that conforms to open standards (the RFCs)."
When Microsoft releases an RFC for.doc format, then this position will be hypocritical. But until then, it's perfectly consistent. (Alternatively, they could make Outlook obey the RFCs... then Mr. Moffitt's header hacks won't bother it any more.)
It's interesting to look at the various links to the right of the main story on that page. The one titled "Experts Question Microsoft Action," for example, has yet *another* example of Microsoft's dirty tricks: violating the Tunney Act by trying to make deals with legislators (totally aside from their attempts at deal-making with the DoJ) and not informing the court about it.
Then there's the way MS wants to bar the public from the proceedings... while it's heartening to see that they can still lose (maybe -- the case isn't over yet!), it's also kind fo scary to see that they're actually starting to learn more about how to (try to) manipulate the process in Washington. Compared to their bumbling in the political arena a few years back, they've actually made giant strides. Which does not bode well.
We may have just one won battle (though actually, I'd prefer to think that *justice* just won a round), but we need to keep our eyes on MS. They're not about to roll over and play dead, and I think they're getting wilier.
Linksys is already doing one, and it looks pretty sweet. It's called the "EtherFast Cable/DSL Router", and acts as a router, hub and switch with firewalling, NAT and IP masq abilities.
i've never eaten a chalupa, and there is no balogna in my house, oscar meyer or otherwise....
If i happened to like balogna, and i was shopping for balogna, and the oscar meyer song happened to stick in my head...
Look, this is not a spelling flame, okay? Really, it isn't. Because I just have to say that I think the fact that you can't spell Oscar Mayer properly actually lends more weight to your argument!
Just because you hear something over and over again doesn't mean you'll even remember it properly, neveer mind that it will affect your behavior in any predictable way. (May the advertisers despair.)
Yes, you have indeed seen it at cons. My housemates and I bought a copy, because we couldn't remember what the hell we were doing. We'd all blocked the thing almost completely out of our memories, and we were curious.
Well, it really is as bad as the reviewer over at teleport-city.com says. It's horrible. It's wretched. Look, do you remember Scrooged, the '80s update of A Christmas Carol with Bill Murray as a cold-hearted TV exec who gets visited by the three ghosts while producing a "very special Christmastime event" (i.e., a holiday special adaptation of A Christmas Carol)? Remember how awful the specials were that his network did? They had Buddy Hackett as Scrooge and Mary Lou Retton as Tiny Tim, and this thing was going to be on right after some kind of thing about Lee Majors keeping the Soviets from holding the North Pole hostage.
Well, this Star Wars thing is just the sort of thing that Scrooged was satirizing. My housemates and I got it home, couldn't wait to see it, and wound up fast-forwarding as much as we could. The pace drags on and on making you wonder just how i n c r e d i b l y s lowly someone can possibly make a TV special.
The scary part is, having blocked it out of my memory after having seen it as a small child, I appear to have been blocking it out a second time after seeing it earlier this year. Reading the teleport-city review brought it all back, but if not for that, had I been asked about the contents of this tragedy I would have just said "Oh, God, it was awful; it was really boring and slow and cheesy and had lots of wookies doing boring shit."
Honestly, the best part is the commercials. I found them especially cool because the show was apparently taped in Baltimore. Since I was living in DC back then, some of the local ads even overlap. And you will not believe the clothing styles, or the prices on things. It's just surreal.
But the one thing I cannot stress too much is that, when Rob says "Nothing can be this bad", he is wrong. I saw that, and even before reading the review, I instantly thought, "No, I have to reply to this; I have to warn people. I don't care what the review says; no matter how bad or nasty the review is, the actual special is worse."
The spelling you're looking for is "unices". Similar to "matrices", "indices" or "vertices" (the plurals of "matrix", "index" and "vertex", respectively).
BTW, I wouldn't normally have mentioned it, except that you put a "(sp?)" in. I took that as a request for the proper spelling.
(Just got off a week of copyediting at my volunteer job, and still haven't quite gotten out of copyediting mode!)
>So this idiot writes a threatening e-mail to me because his site
>wants to refer people to my site (bus schedules) and keep a frame up >top with their advertisements in it. Their reasoning is that >they are driving traffic to my site, so they have a right to show >advertisements around it. They are upset that I won't allow that.
And they had the nerve to threaten you? Wow. They should consider themselves damn lucky you haven't put those pages behind a CGI script that checks the HTTP_REFERER and lets in anyone except someone coming from their site. (Then, for people coming in from the assholes' site, you could display whatever other content you wanted...)
That's kind of like bitching out a cop for pulling you over, or complaining to your boss that she shouldn't have reprimanded you for tardiness. You've got all the power in this situation, and the folks trying to threaten you already have a strike against them for linking to you inside their frameset.
>Try to understand that people are very afraid right now.
>Try to leave your trenchcoat, your Marilyn Manson >t-shirts and your skull earrings at home for a few weeks. >When the urge comes upon you to utter threats in a rage >or say that you understand how the gunmen felt, >bite your tongue and post about it later.
Another option: use this as an opportunity to change people's minds. People tend to sort of believe what they see on the nightly news, but they really have a gut reaction to the things they actually encounter on the street.
So wear that trenchcoat, the skull earrings, the black lipstick and all that jazz... and be friendly to everyone you meet. Yes, even the assholes (at least, don't be hostile to them). Hold doors for people, smile, and generally make it clear that even freaky-looking weirdoes are nice people.
I and my friends do this sometimes -- it's amazing how many people you meet that way. And it's been fairly obvious to us that we're having some effect on at least some of the people we run into as we cruise down the street in our black leather, spreading goodwill.
>Everyone has an opinion on variable names, but once you've made
>up your mind, do you really care how someone else deals with >them? Would any advice make you change?
Actually, I've been exposed to just such advice not too long ago. (Well, maybe a year?)
It came in two parts: an anecdote and then the Perl Style Guide. First, I was in a talk with my (now ex-; non-pointy-haired) boss about programming practices. He mentioned an obfuscated piece he'd done one time, using the same variable name on practically every level of execution (global, subroutine, plus various levels of what Perl calls blocks, though he was writing in C). The whole thing worked because he was insanely careful with scope declarations.
It occurred to me then that I should be more careful about scope in my own stuff, though I still see no reason to take it to extremes.:)
About a month after that, I happened to run into the Perl Style Guide, where it advises using variable_names instead of VariableNames, partly because you can then use case to determine the difference between CONSTANT_VARIABLES, Global_Variables and local_variables.
That one really gave me food for thought, and I eventually decided to adopt it. (Which causes its own problems: not only did I have to learn some new variable-naming habits, but now that I've learned them, it starts to flip me out when I see my old code!)
I'll agree that it's rare for someone to change hir mind on aesthetic issues like that, but it does happen.
IIRC, one of the other things that killed Betamax was that a single tape would only hold 1 hour on it, so you'd have to swap tapes in the middle of a movie. This annoyed people. VHS' ability to hold an entire (average, 2-hour) movie on one tape was a major consideration.
... you know, the one against "cruel and unusual punishment"? I think this qualifies. It's a perfect way to insure that he'll have no way to make a living when he gets out, except crime.
The (surprisingly well-written) essay on the Free Kevin site had a very strong point about the valuation of the stolen information -- how much is it really worth? There's no way he can ever pay it back, and if he doesn't, they can go after him for that, too. They've got him for life.
Before this whole case, I thought Kevin Mitnick was slime. Now I'm developing more and more sympathy for him every day.
>There may come a day, however, when we _CAN'T_ make jokes about
>freedom of speech/press because there won't be any. You know where >I'll be then? Me and ESR and Jesse Ventura will be in a >bunker with food, guns, and our families.
And I'll be bemoaning the fact that the efforts I was making to safeguard free speech, back in the 20th century, came to naught.
For all I know, you may be doing the same, so this is not aimed at you personally. But while planning what you'll do when civil liberties fall has its constructive uses, it's no substitute for actively working to prevent that fall from ever occurring. I hope everyone here who's commented that "free speech is not a laughing matter" is doing things to defend it. Even just sending some money to the ACLU or your equivalent organization in your country of residence is a great start.
Personally, I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU (and proudly broadcasting that fact is another thing I do -- raising respect for the ACLU and its mission is something I think this country really needs, especially after Dukakis' sellout in the 1988 election!). I think freedom of speech is crucially important.
But I also think that when we designate something as "too important to joke about", that's also going too far. While it chilled me to the bone, this prank also made me chuckle, and it made me impressed with the amount of planning and coordination that had gone into it.
What really scares me is how nobody has yet pointed out the way Fairfax describes open source in their article:
Open Source is an
increasingly valuable marketing position that has grown from a philosophy that software and its programming code should be shared among all programmers.
(Emphasis added.)
That really is the way quite a few companies view it -- not as a philosophy or even a "new business model", but as a marketing tactic.
It seems that, where we had to do some education last year on the meaning of the word "free" in "free software", we now have to do some education about the meaning of the word "open" in "open source".
An earlier post under the subject line "Poor Us" stated:
>I say, if you can see the source code, its open source.
I don't mean to jump down that person's throat, but that is only one small part of what's necessary for something to be open source. I use an alternative MTA, Qmail, which comes in source form, so you can definitely see the source, but the author keeps tight control over what actually goes into it -- nobody else can check things into the source tree, even suggestions for improvements or alterations are generally rejected. There are lots and lots of patches, but nobody but the author gets to fuck with Qmail's source.
There have been discussi ons on the Qmail mailing list about just how free (or open) Qmail is, based partly on that requirement. (Follow Vern Hart's reply from the link.)
Apparently, the proliferation of patches to Qmail (and, more importantly, the fact that the author places no restrictions on such patches!) allows it to meet the OSD, but it's a close shave.
I use this as an example, and especially refer readers to Dave Sill and Vern Hart's "more free/less free" phrasing in the referenced thread on the Qmail mailing list. Freedom or openness is a continuum, and supplying source is only one step along it.
If we let corporations get away with promoting the idea that "if you can see the source, it's open source software" -- and especially if we start believing it ourselves -- then the movement is finished as a significant force in computing. That's the first step toward letting it become the mere "marketing position" that Fairfax claims.
Looking Like the Borg
on
Wearable PCs
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· Score: 1
>Unlike the mammoth eyepieces worn by the Borg villains on the Star
>Trek TV shows, the IBM headset display is relatively unobtrusive. >``We're trying to break the geek factor for wearing these in public,'' >says Budd, who envisions widespread headset use on commercial >airliners and commuter trains.
I can see why they're trying to go for mainstream acceptance, but what about those of us who want to look like Borg? Or like k-rad cyberpunk hax0rZ?
Someone could make a few bucks building eyepiece displays that look like high-tech, ultra-chromed things that you'd expect to have lasers in them.
How about displays that look like they're grafted to your head?
Slashdot Mirror
See Absurd Notions, page 4, the last three comics on the page.
For an actual response to the question... like many others have said, I assume you were doing this for money, not for free, right? If it's for money, then I don't see any problem. They get what they want (their network fixed), you get what you want (to be paid), everyone's happy.
If, OTOH, your ex-boss was demanding that you donate your time and effort for free, then I can't see any reason not to just laugh in her face.
Gosh, you mean that Eminem, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Doors, and Queen are all outside copyright protection? I'm sure the surviving members of those groups, plus Michael Jackson, would be very surprised to hear that.
The GPL is based on copyright, which is applied to any creative work automatically as soon as it's created.
Shrinkwrap licenses, OTOH, are based on contract law. One common aspect of contract law is that a contract must be mutually agreed on by both parties: it must be signed, by two people (sometimes more).
There is no signature involved in a shrinkwrap license. Heck, with the "Terms of Use" agreements that are becoming popular on many Web sites (like, "By viewing any part of this site, you agree not to link to us without prior written permission" and other such bullshit), there's no assurance that the other party has even read the thing.
This has also been at issue in certain software licenses... there have been ones that could be installed in various ways that didn't involve having to see the license.
That's why the GPL takes precedence.
... if he's going to slag off the tech community like this, I see no reason why I should become one. Seriously, does he really think that saying "My record sales suck because my fans are all pirates" is going to win him any points?
However, that being said... this is also a wake-up call for the tech community. The mere fact that Moby thinks he can get away with saying this kind of stuff tells me that the RIAA/MPAA's public-relations smear campaign to portray all computer people as pirates is winning. This is not good.
Note also that the editors at Launch took his theory seriously, and printed it up as plain news.
We need to do some public-opinion shaping of our own, and fast. If we keep letting the music companies dominate the discussion, we're toast.
Unless there's some kind of interface for the user, it seems like this could only be used to accept incoming calls. I can't imagine how you'd tell it to dial somewhere -- there can't be any room for a keypad, and it would probably feel incredibly weird if there was one. Sure, you could do weird things like clacking your teeth together in Morse Code or something, but I think that would be a really annoying way to have to dial. Besides, then couldn't it get accidentally triggered while you were eating?
It sounds like a really interesting back-end technology, but until there's a decent UI, it will not be ready for the market.
> i'm not aware of any pedestrians being run over by a computer being used by some kid.
You mean you've never heard of some poor innocent person getting DDoSed halfway to eternity... by a bunch of Winboxen on cable modem hookups, that had been cracked by skr1pt kiddies?
Heck, Yahoo got knocked flat by DDoS. And where did the skript kidZ get the systems they used for it? Simple: those systems were left wide open by people just like the ones that are causing the questioner so much grief: people who will download any virus-laden executable they can get their hands on.
On a global network, one person's insecure box is everyone else's potential attacker.
Well, I should hope so! I don't think anyone would want to buy a game, or any other form of entertainment, made by people who deliberately tried to make it less fun.
Which, I think, is the whole point here. Of course Sony tries to make EQ as fun as possible -- that's the whole business of an entertainment provider. But I don't think that means they're "trying to get people addicted to it", and I certainly don't think it can be held against them. (Heck, if they deliberately made EQ less fun, their stockholders would come after them in a big hurry...)
Actually, I'm doing a Mandrake install today (and I just figured out why I can't get to their Web site for docs!). I'm trying to do something at least a little l33t, namely set /bin, /sbin, and /lib up as their own partitions and mount them read-only.
DrakX doesn't like that. Despite the fact that I told it at the beginning that I wanted to do an "Expert" install, and despite being in expert mode in the disk partitioning utility, every time I tell it I want to make a partition mount at /bin (or any of those directories), it gives me an error message saying that directory should be on the root partition.
Software that arrogantly claims it knows better than I, the human, do is one of the things I hate about many Windows programs. I don't mind if it goes, "Hey, that's kind of weird. Are you sure you want to do that?", and gives me a button or check box that says, "Yes, I really do want to do that."
But when it says, "No, no, you don't want to do that!" -- and doesn't give me any way to insist that I'm damn well going to do it anyway, because I'm the human and the computer is there for me, not the other way around -- well, that's when I get really annoyed with a piece of software.
If I just wanted to watch a movie once, I'd rent it from my local Blockbuster or similar video store. Those places carry DVDs now.
But if I buy a product, I damn well want to use it more than once! (Well, a data-carrying product, anyway. Food is a different story...)
I'm sure they could have tried to make VHS tapes, audio cassettes, and so on, that would only play once. Nobody was fool enough to try it until now.
I predict this thing will crash and burn at least as badly as DivX did.
...subcutaneous computers. If the miniaturization trend keeps going this way, I figure ten years from now, we'll be able to pack a CPU, RAM and HD inside your body, with no ill effects.
Now, if we can just get a workable interface for that, it'll actually mean something. Without the interface, it's pretty pointless. As someone said, "imagine trying to type on that."
"No sound?" No way! It should play Also Sprach Zarathustra as its startup sound!
And some kind of eerie wailing noise would be canonical, from the scene on the Moon. Maybe it should just do that around sunrise (and maybe sunset)?
>Its ok to say "Use anything except outlook" when
>you are on the linux side.
>
>What would you say, if I said use a program that
>can read Word docs [slashdot.org]??
The point about these anti-Outlook headers is that they're still perfectly conformant with RFCs 821, 822, et al. Any conformant mail-reader can read these messages just fine.
But there is no RFC for Word .doc format. In either case, the underlying message is "use a mail client that conforms to open standards (the RFCs)."
When Microsoft releases an RFC for .doc format, then this position will be hypocritical. But until then, it's perfectly consistent. (Alternatively, they could make Outlook obey the RFCs... then Mr. Moffitt's header hacks won't bother it any more.)
It's interesting to look at the various links to the right of the main story on that page. The one titled "Experts Question Microsoft Action," for example, has yet *another* example of Microsoft's dirty tricks: violating the Tunney Act by trying to make deals with legislators (totally aside from their attempts at deal-making with the DoJ) and not informing the court about it.
Then there's the way MS wants to bar the public from the proceedings... while it's heartening to see that they can still lose (maybe -- the case isn't over yet!), it's also kind fo scary to see that they're actually starting to learn more about how to (try to) manipulate the process in Washington. Compared to their bumbling in the political arena a few years back, they've actually made giant strides. Which does not bode well.
We may have just one won battle (though actually, I'd prefer to think that *justice* just won a round), but we need to keep our eyes on MS. They're not about to roll over and play dead, and I think they're getting wilier.
Linksys is already doing one, and it looks pretty sweet. It's called the "EtherFast Cable/DSL Router", and acts as a router, hub and switch with firewalling, NAT and IP masq abilities.
It's right on their front page at www.linksys.com.
Look, this is not a spelling flame, okay? Really, it isn't. Because I just have to say that I think the fact that you can't spell Oscar Mayer properly actually lends more weight to your argument!
Just because you hear something over and over again doesn't mean you'll even remember it properly, neveer mind that it will affect your behavior in any predictable way. (May the advertisers despair.)
Yes, you have indeed seen it at cons. My housemates and I bought a copy, because we couldn't remember what the hell we were doing. We'd all blocked the thing almost completely out of our memories, and we were curious.
Well, it really is as bad as the reviewer over at teleport-city.com says. It's horrible. It's wretched. Look, do you remember Scrooged, the '80s update of A Christmas Carol with Bill Murray as a cold-hearted TV exec who gets visited by the three ghosts while producing a "very special Christmastime event" (i.e., a holiday special adaptation of A Christmas Carol)? Remember how awful the specials were that his network did? They had Buddy Hackett as Scrooge and Mary Lou Retton as Tiny Tim, and this thing was going to be on right after some kind of thing about Lee Majors keeping the Soviets from holding the North Pole hostage.
Well, this Star Wars thing is just the sort of thing that Scrooged was satirizing. My housemates and I got it home, couldn't wait to see it, and wound up fast-forwarding as much as we could. The pace drags on and on making you wonder just how
i n c r e d i b l y s lowly someone can possibly make a TV special.
The scary part is, having blocked it out of my memory after having seen it as a small child, I appear to have been blocking it out a second time after seeing it earlier this year. Reading the teleport-city review brought it all back, but if not for that, had I been asked about the contents of this tragedy I would have just said "Oh, God, it was awful; it was really boring and slow and cheesy and had lots of wookies doing boring shit."
Honestly, the best part is the commercials. I found them especially cool because the show was apparently taped in Baltimore. Since I was living in DC back then, some of the local ads even overlap. And you will not believe the clothing styles, or the prices on things. It's just surreal.
But the one thing I cannot stress too much is that, when Rob says "Nothing can be this bad", he is wrong. I saw that, and even before reading the review, I instantly thought, "No, I have to reply to this; I have to warn people. I don't care what the review says; no matter how bad or nasty the review is, the actual special is worse ."
It really is that bad. You have been warned.
The spelling you're looking for is "unices". Similar to "matrices", "indices" or "vertices" (the plurals of "matrix", "index" and "vertex", respectively).
BTW, I wouldn't normally have mentioned it, except that you put a "(sp?)" in. I took that as a request for the proper spelling.
(Just got off a week of copyediting at my volunteer job, and still haven't quite gotten out of copyediting mode!)
And they had the nerve to threaten you? Wow. They should consider themselves damn lucky you haven't put those pages behind a CGI script that checks the HTTP_REFERER and lets in anyone except someone coming from their site. (Then, for people coming in from the assholes' site, you could display whatever other content you wanted...)
That's kind of like bitching out a cop for pulling you over, or complaining to your boss that she shouldn't have reprimanded you for tardiness. You've got all the power in this situation, and the folks trying to threaten you already have a strike against them for linking to you inside their frameset.
What did they threaten with, anyway?
Another option: use this as an opportunity to change people's minds. People tend to sort of believe what they see on the nightly news, but they really have a gut reaction to the things they actually encounter on the street.
So wear that trenchcoat, the skull earrings, the black lipstick and all that jazz... and be friendly to everyone you meet. Yes, even the assholes (at least, don't be hostile to them). Hold doors for people, smile, and generally make it clear that even freaky-looking weirdoes are nice people.
I and my friends do this sometimes -- it's amazing how many people you meet that way. And it's been fairly obvious to us that we're having some effect on at least some of the people we run into as we cruise down the street in our black leather, spreading goodwill.
Try it.
Actually, I've been exposed to just such advice not too long ago. (Well, maybe a year?)
It came in two parts: an anecdote and then the Perl Style Guide. First, I was in a talk with my (now ex-; non-pointy-haired) boss about programming practices. He mentioned an obfuscated piece he'd done one time, using the same variable name on practically every level of execution (global, subroutine, plus various levels of what Perl calls blocks, though he was writing in C). The whole thing worked because he was insanely careful with scope declarations.
It occurred to me then that I should be more careful about scope in my own stuff, though I still see no reason to take it to extremes. :)
About a month after that, I happened to run into the Perl Style Guide, where it advises using variable_names instead of VariableNames, partly because you can then use case to determine the difference between CONSTANT_VARIABLES, Global_Variables and local_variables.
That one really gave me food for thought, and I eventually decided to adopt it. (Which causes its own problems: not only did I have to learn some new variable-naming habits, but now that I've learned them, it starts to flip me out when I see my old code!)
I'll agree that it's rare for someone to change hir mind on aesthetic issues like that, but it does happen.
IIRC, one of the other things that killed Betamax was that a single tape would only hold 1 hour on it, so you'd have to swap tapes in the middle of a movie. This annoyed people. VHS' ability to hold an entire (average, 2-hour) movie on one tape was a major consideration.
... you know, the one against "cruel and unusual punishment"? I think this qualifies. It's a perfect way to insure that he'll have no way to make a living when he gets out, except crime.
The (surprisingly well-written) essay on the Free Kevin site had a very strong point about the valuation of the stolen information -- how much is it really worth? There's no way he can ever pay it back, and if he doesn't, they can go after him for that, too. They've got him for life.
Before this whole case, I thought Kevin Mitnick was slime. Now I'm developing more and more sympathy for him every day.
And I'll be bemoaning the fact that the efforts I was making to safeguard free speech, back in the 20th century, came to naught.
For all I know, you may be doing the same, so this is not aimed at you personally. But while planning what you'll do when civil liberties fall has its constructive uses, it's no substitute for actively working to prevent that fall from ever occurring. I hope everyone here who's commented that "free speech is not a laughing matter" is doing things to defend it. Even just sending some money to the ACLU or your equivalent organization in your country of residence is a great start.
Personally, I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU (and proudly broadcasting that fact is another thing I do -- raising respect for the ACLU and its mission is something I think this country really needs, especially after Dukakis' sellout in the 1988 election!). I think freedom of speech is crucially important.
But I also think that when we designate something as "too important to joke about", that's also going too far. While it chilled me to the bone, this prank also made me chuckle, and it made me impressed with the amount of planning and coordination that had gone into it.
What really scares me is how nobody has yet pointed out the way Fairfax describes open source in their article:
(Emphasis added.)
That really is the way quite a few companies view it -- not as a philosophy or even a "new business model", but as a marketing tactic.
It seems that, where we had to do some education last year on the meaning of the word "free" in "free software", we now have to do some education about the meaning of the word "open" in "open source".
An earlier post under the subject line "Poor Us" stated:
I don't mean to jump down that person's throat, but that is only one small part of what's necessary for something to be open source. I use an alternative MTA, Qmail, which comes in source form, so you can definitely see the source, but the author keeps tight control over what actually goes into it -- nobody else can check things into the source tree, even suggestions for improvements or alterations are generally rejected. There are lots and lots of patches, but nobody but the author gets to fuck with Qmail's source.
There have been discussi ons on the Qmail mailing list about just how free (or open) Qmail is, based partly on that requirement. (Follow Vern Hart's reply from the link.)
Apparently, the proliferation of patches to Qmail (and, more importantly, the fact that the author places no restrictions on such patches!) allows it to meet the OSD, but it's a close shave.
I use this as an example, and especially refer readers to Dave Sill and Vern Hart's "more free/less free" phrasing in the referenced thread on the Qmail mailing list. Freedom or openness is a continuum, and supplying source is only one step along it.
If we let corporations get away with promoting the idea that "if you can see the source, it's open source software" -- and especially if we start believing it ourselves -- then the movement is finished as a significant force in computing. That's the first step toward letting it become the mere "marketing position" that Fairfax claims.
I can see why they're trying to go for mainstream acceptance, but what about those of us who want to look like Borg? Or like k-rad cyberpunk hax0rZ?
Someone could make a few bucks building eyepiece displays that look like high-tech, ultra-chromed things that you'd expect to have lasers in them.
How about displays that look like they're grafted to your head?