The Best Buy in Reston, VA, got taken to court a couple of years ago for trying to discourage comparison shopping.
An enterprising gentleman built himself an Excel spreadsheet to help him compare prices on big screen TVs, then he loaded said spreadsheet onto a notebook computer and went shopping. When he got to Best Buy and started jotting down prices, the store manager called the cops and threw him out. The next day the same gentleman went back with a pad of paper and a pen, and was immediately thrown out, again, with more cops and an arrest this time. When he got to court, the judge threw out the case with lots of nasty words about Best Buy. Eventually said gentleman sued Best Buy, but that case got thrown out by the (different) judge too.
At the time Circuit City got a lot of good press by inviting said gentleman to spend as much time as he wanted comparison-pricing their TVs.
That said, while I may go to Circuit City to check prices, I'll never buy there... I hate having to fend off the sales-critters.
Unlike UserFriendly, Dilbert is backed by a Very Large Corporation -- United Features Syndicate, and is published in hundreds of newspapers around the world. Any time Scott Adams draws a strip, his editors at UFS check it to make sure that they don't have any legal liability with regards to libel, etc. UFS has lawyers on staff whose only job is to keep UFS from getting sued.
Since Illiad isn't a deep-pockets corporation, he's much more vulnerable to legal action.
What are the legal distinctions between US law and Canadian law regarding libel, parody, and freedom of speech? The US is pretty liberal about these issues, what about Canada?
Furthermore, it is rather hypocritical of him to complain about public backstabbing when he himself has no problem putting down RMS and Bruce Perens among others for their views. Lastely, he called us, - Slashdot kiddies. We are just as a legitimate part of the Linux community as he is.
Everytime I hear this argument it makes me sick.
I'm sorry I have to be the one to point this out to you, but not everyone in the community is equal, nor should they be equal. I don't agree with RMS very often, but his work on the FSF and GNU (and even Emacs) gives him high stature in the community. ESR has done a lot of quality work as well, which gives him high stature. Linus has contributed to the community and is similarly held in high regard.
For myself, I don't count myself as equal to the likes of RMS, ESR, Linus, or hundreds of other community members who have given so much more than I have. I've made some small contributions here and there, but nothing to their scale. As for you, Mr/Ms Anonymous Coward, if you don't feel like using your name, your stature must not be worth much... certainly not worth that of RMS, Linus or ESR.
Equality is an idea that the masses like to cling to because it helps them pretend that they're better than they really are. No one is really equal because no one's contributions exactly match those contributions of another. That doesn't mean that everyone is worthless if they haven't written an OS kernel or a mondo-text editor or explained why free software works. It does mean that community members are more likely to respect and listen to those people who have contributed the most. If you want to be listened to, all you have to do is contribute... instead of flames.
The other good thing to come of this is that it cuts the legs out from under Network Solutions:
The court basically ruled that (1) domain names are property, and (2) NSI doesn't own them -- the registrants own them. The annual fee to NSI is just to have physical property associated with IP addresses. Consequently, NSI can't take my domain name away from me (although the courts can through the normal legal process). More importantly, NSI no longer owns the data in their database that associates domain names (that they don't own) with IP addresses (that they don't own), not that they legally owned that data in the first place...
No, what happened to toysrgus.com should have been a frivolous suit. Instead, because a major corporation was doing the suing, it became a legitimate suit... in the eyes of the court.
Part of the problem in comparing prices is that Dell changes the configurations it sells, and their prices, depending upon the perceived market.
I did my pricing for mini-tower workstations for small businesses (fewer than 400 employees) and the price differential was roughly $920 in NT's favor. Other people compared desktop workstations for home users and got a $20 difference.
Another problem lies in the difficulty in doing an apples-to-apples comparison; the default configurations for Dell NT workstations is wildly different from the defaults for Linux workstations.
In any case, while I like Dell's workstation hardware (reliable, easy to configure) I find that Dell offers too many configurations to too many markets, with too much price fluxuation, depending upon the presumed target demographic group.
I decided to browse on down to Dell and price a Linux workstation, just to see that $20 difference. Since Windows NT costs so much more than Red Hat Linux, I wanted to see where the $20 came from.
For starters, the Linux version is sold on a different price page than the Windows 9X/NT version, and has *much* fewer options -- no dual processor options, no sound card options, misc other options missing. The options for the two pages are in different sequences, making comparison much harder too.
After grumbling a bit, I pulled up 2 browser windows, and side-by-side matched options for the following configuration:
Slashdot Mirror
An enterprising gentleman built himself an Excel spreadsheet to help him compare prices on big screen TVs, then he loaded said spreadsheet onto a notebook computer and went shopping. When he got to Best Buy and started jotting down prices, the store manager called the cops and threw him out. The next day the same gentleman went back with a pad of paper and a pen, and was immediately thrown out, again, with more cops and an arrest this time. When he got to court, the judge threw out the case with lots of nasty words about Best Buy. Eventually said gentleman sued Best Buy, but that case got thrown out by the (different) judge too.
At the time Circuit City got a lot of good press by inviting said gentleman to spend as much time as he wanted comparison-pricing their TVs.
That said, while I may go to Circuit City to check prices, I'll never buy there ... I hate having to fend off the sales-critters.
Cookies? You actually accept cookies? :)
Since Illiad isn't a deep-pockets corporation, he's much more vulnerable to legal action.
What are the legal distinctions between US law and Canadian law regarding libel, parody, and freedom of speech? The US is pretty liberal about these issues, what about Canada?
Everytime I hear this argument it makes me sick.
I'm sorry I have to be the one to point this out to you, but not everyone in the community is equal, nor should they be equal. I don't agree with RMS very often, but his work on the FSF and GNU (and even Emacs) gives him high stature in the community. ESR has done a lot of quality work as well, which gives him high stature. Linus has contributed to the community and is similarly held in high regard.
For myself, I don't count myself as equal to the likes of RMS, ESR, Linus, or hundreds of other community members who have given so much more than I have. I've made some small contributions here and there, but nothing to their scale. As for you, Mr/Ms Anonymous Coward, if you don't feel like using your name, your stature must not be worth much ... certainly not worth that of RMS, Linus or ESR.
Equality is an idea that the masses like to cling to because it helps them pretend that they're better than they really are. No one is really equal because no one's contributions exactly match those contributions of another. That doesn't mean that everyone is worthless if they haven't written an OS kernel or a mondo-text editor or explained why free software works. It does mean that community members are more likely to respect and listen to those people who have contributed the most. If you want to be listened to, all you have to do is contribute ... instead of flames.
It doesn't surprise me that you got censored by Linux Today ... you're lucky Rob's more lenient than LT.
The court basically ruled that (1) domain names are property, and (2) NSI doesn't own them -- the registrants own them. The annual fee to NSI is just to have physical property associated with IP addresses. Consequently, NSI can't take my domain name away from me (although the courts can through the normal legal process). More importantly, NSI no longer owns the data in their database that associates domain names (that they don't own) with IP addresses (that they don't own), not that they legally owned that data in the first place...
No, what happened to toysrgus.com should have been a frivolous suit. Instead, because a major corporation was doing the suing, it became a legitimate suit ... in the eyes of the court.
I did my pricing for mini-tower workstations for small businesses (fewer than 400 employees) and the price differential was roughly $920 in NT's favor. Other people compared desktop workstations for home users and got a $20 difference.
Another problem lies in the difficulty in doing an apples-to-apples comparison; the default configurations for Dell NT workstations is wildly different from the defaults for Linux workstations.
In any case, while I like Dell's workstation hardware (reliable, easy to configure) I find that Dell offers too many configurations to too many markets, with too much price fluxuation, depending upon the presumed target demographic group.
For starters, the Linux version is sold on a different price page than the Windows 9X/NT version, and has *much* fewer options -- no dual processor options, no sound card options, misc other options missing. The options for the two pages are in different sequences, making comparison much harder too.
After grumbling a bit, I pulled up 2 browser windows, and side-by-side matched options for the following configuration:
Precision 410 MiniTower, Pentium II/450, 128mb ECC RAM, (1) 9gb SCSI HD, 21" UltraScan 1600HS monitor, Diamond Permedia 2 AGP graphics card, IOMEGA ATAPI Zip drive
The price for Windows NT: $3891
The price for Linux: $4809
What's wrong with this picture???