You know, posts like this really renew my interest in coming to SlashDot. After wading thru all the dreck, bad spelling, OS and license wars, once in awhile somebody lays out a nice intelligent argument. Somebody please mod this guy up!
wouldn't brag about the development environment: it's torture.
Interesting viewpoint, considering it's actually their development environment that's responsible for a lot of their success. They've consistently managed to draw developers to their platform, and one of the reasons is they make it ever-easier to produce apps. Now this doesn't appeal to the "let's make it hard and obscure as possible so we can show we're men" crowd, but to the people who actually have to produce a slick-looking app for the marketing dept. in no time it works all day.
At least people in an ideal communist state are treated as individuals
Unfortunately we don't seem to have any ideal communist states. Please see the World Trade Bank refusal to find China for telling 50k farmers to move to Tibet. Our government might tell people they have to move, but wouldn't tell them where.
In democracy, the majority rules, and the individual is sacrificed.
Well the individual's vote may not be the wasy it goes, but you can always run for office yourself. Let's face it, any lousy actor or governor can do it if they try hard enough.
Unfourtunately, people who consume more are not happier than people who are poor.
No, but they have much better toys.
but I try not to judge people based on whether they are good workers
I'm down with that in a basic Buddhist way, but if you think back to a time when there was only one guy in the village who made shoes, one who grew wheat, etc. you may consider that producing enough of your specialty for the group probably equated pretty well with being "good" in a help-out not-see-people-without-shoes-on kinda way.
This is EXACTLY the kind of thing the successor to the KGB mandates in every Russian ISP. So what's the difference? The FBI guys wear white hats? These people need to be stopped NOW. With this in place, any individual even making a joke about drugs, politics or blowing up Congress in email will be susceptible to surveillance and harassment. Once they have your name in their little (big!) file they're NOT going to delete it, and you can look forward to a life under surveillance. The concept that 270 million people need to be searched in order to capture the tiny percentage of the population who are terrorists and drug dealers and child porno's is morally and intellectually bankrupt. They might as well just do mandatory house-to-house searches.
Re:China vs The Cult of Microsoft-quite possible
on
Linux And Beijing
·
· Score: 1
Maybe we will start seeing Red china harassing windows users as being Members of the Evil Microsoft Cult.
Actually if their main concern is security they may indeed forbid the use of Windows, especially if connected to a network, saying that it may send info back to MS or the NSA. It wouldn't matter of course that none of that could be proved (like go ahead and use it and we'll watch with a packet sniffer), but the rulers there never required much in the way of facts to buttress their positions anyway. They just make the policy (no Falun Gong) and imprison and kill people who violate it. (You know, like the US does with the "War on Drugs".)
So, we will eventually see people turning into martyrs for Windows! The headlines will read "2000 Chinese businessmen today were rounded up and taken to a re-education center as a result of their insistence on continuing to use Word and Excel on a Windows 95 system. One miscreant said: 'But I need my address book!' and was promptly beaten with a Red Flag CD."
Could it be, that by arbitrarily defining their "billing cycle" NSI is able to hold on to domains that have been expired for years.
No, it's just people writing Slashdot stories without taking 2 minutes to research the question. Why bother to do that when you can make a conspiracy out of it, eh?
The billing cycle is a year of course, as anyone who's ever registered a domain or bothered to read the payment policy should know. Duh.
Hey, you've equated an unwillingness to turn my daily schedule upside-down by not car pooling (or whatever behaviour you deem as necessary) with membership in one of the most hated and evil empires the earth has ever seen. That's wholly inappropriate and trivializes one of the worst episodes of the 20th century. If you hold these opinions and you're not a hypocrite then get to some nice bush-hut in the Kalahari. (sp?) Otherwise you're just as guilty as anyone.
Yes, there is a real world with shades of grey, in which harm is caused inadvertently, and you're perfectly willing to accuse the 97% of the populace that doesn't car pool of being as bad as the Nazis, no matter what ELSE they may do to help the environment. That's exactly the kind of rhetoric that hurts the ecology movement in this country. Did you consider that in the "inadvertent harm" you mentioned?
Well, then I might as well say you're worse than Mussolini. I mean, what the hell, call a fascist a fascist, right? Behaviour that your don't like, no matter the practical reality, is tantamount to being a freakin' Nazi.
As it happens, I work at home, do you? Do you take a bike everyday to work? Make your own shoes out of dead animal skins? You can't possibly be an ecological activist if you use computers, the making of which requires vast amounts of nasty chemicals.
Come on, where do you draw the line? At what point of primitism do you get before you're not responsible for world destruction? How do you justify existence in a developed country at all?
You want to be a condescending hypocrite, fine. Like I said originally, we don't need any more judgemental assholes. Have a nice day.
Again, you guys aren't EVER interested in reality, not as long as you can go karma-whoring with your "holier-than-thou" attitude.
Public transportation and car pooling are NOT an option where I live. It just doesn't work for most people. That doesn't make them bad people, or any less concerned with the environment.
While I don't yet claim that unwillingness to carpool is morally equivalent to tacit cooperation with the Third Reich (I hadn't mentioned the Holocaust) I do claim that the fact that most people base their daily choices on local concerns rather than broader ones is responsible for both facts.
Not Yet? Oh good, because I get so annoyed after reading messages from the self-appointed guardians of all-that's-good-and-noble that I just have to go out for a long drive. I'd take the small car, but the big one is in front of the garage and it's an inconvenience to open it.
I am a Grown Up in my thirties who knows LOTS of people who juggle careers and family
Well, good. Then you know how stupid it is to expect them all to car pool. Personally I don't have kids (and in fact, work at home) but I really can't see my former co-workers all car pooling. In fact, in New Jersey they closed the HOV lanes because it actually caused MORE pollution by tying up traffic even worse.
There's a differencing between moralizing and observing, and when the latter is demonized as the former, God help us all.
The "moralizing" was obviously in reference to the original post, which is exactly what he was doing.
that we at least nominally consider sub-optimal
Well, actually not everyone believes that, but around here that dogma is generally accepted, yes. Just as is the attitude of the original poster that developers and businesses who don't accept the open-source "way" are all clueless. I'm saying that attitude is myopic and judgemental, and keeps a lot of valuable ideas and people out of the little boys club that the "open source community" seems to be. (I'm talking perceptions here folks, and that is at least one of the mainstream perceptions of open source AND SlashDot.)
And I'm sorry, but I don't know how you can mention the Third Riech without conjuring up the Holocaust. And I still don't know why you would, general pessima or not. Again, it shows an alarming lack of perspective.
Ok, so unwillingness to car pool == moral equivalence to going along with the Holocaust? Because you think using gas dooms the world? Can you say "lack of perspective"? Do you know any real people juggling schedules to take care of their kids and businesses? And if not, why not?
Electric utilities are one of the biggest users of carbon fuels and polluters - you gonna turn your computers off?
I didn't think so. In fact, all the traditional toys of "geeks", all the electronics and plastics those evil corporate bastards make for us are about the worst thing we as humans could be producing in terms of their environmental impact. Gonna throw away your MP3 player, stereo, cell phone? And if you did, guess what - no matter how much recycling you do, they're not exactly biodegradable.
What pushed my button was the constant moralizing of technology and rampant stereotyping of anyone not living for Linux.
Yes, you're absolutely right. How shameful I feel! And I keep justifying my use of fuel oil to heat my house even! Who are we to live in these heated houses and apartment buildings? It ruins the natural order. I say, leave all building materials in their natural state! Do the right thing! Sure, some of us will freeze to death, but that'll reduce our burden on Mother Earth. Take my blanket brother! We'll all live in one big tent, imagine the energy we'll save. For the future! For the children!
What amazes you? Reality? That there are people who work 30-60 miles from home? That there may be people who don't like their co-workers? That some people smoke in their cars? (You'll love my cigars. Really.) The limited amount of time in any given day? People with kids and disparate schedules? What aspect of all that are you having a problem with?
There are a lot of ways to save energy "for the future". Solar doesn't work where I am; windmills could help. But when I have to drive to see a client, I'm not taking a freaking party with me.
It just comes right down to daily life concerns for these people. They want to make the most money they can, spend it in the manner they choose, and they're not really about supporting causes unless it's an easy cause to support. You know the kind of people I mean: they recycle their trash, but they don't carpool.
You know, I'm sure you're a really decent guy just communicating his larger-than-average social conciousness, but this comes off as so judgemental and ignorant of most peoples' reality, it's a great reflection of the whole "movement".
How terrible - people who are just trying to make a living and don't give a fig about RMS and the GPL. I guess you just have to feel sorry for 'em. Don't even carpool! OHMIGOD! The cretins!
REALITYCHECK Yeah, the trip to work is 45 minutes, I'll definitely want to add another 30 min to that by stopping by and picking up the gang. To support somebody's cause. No problem. Especially knowing that Joe often has to leave early to pick up his daughter, and Bill stays late to do his manager thing, and Hector and Alex eat lunch at 11:30 while I can't really eat until 1pm at least. And if Robert prefers to spend his lunch hour browsing at the bookstore, well that's too bad.
Providing they created them with PhotoShop or something else which DID pay the licensing fees, why would they have to? As I understand it UNISYS can't touch anyone as long as they used a licensed implementation of a graphics program.
Quite true, and we'll all be in trouble if Congress decides to make it illegal! I envision a license in the future...
On the other hand, most of the port scans I get end up in a SYN flood. I don't take any action until I check it out because I have had situations where it was somebody else's box that was temporarily hijacked, but I can see taking a hard-line attitude with it. Especially when you check on 'em and their domain is something like is-a-hacker.de:-)
Some people use Debian because it's better, not because it's the most free.
Then again, we could say that about any one of a number of operating systems, but if the name doesn't start with 'L' they and their makers get trashed by "the community" (as defined by the first hundred rabid SlashDot posts.)
Imagine, the notion that you'd use a system that works best for your situation, regardless of the "free-ness" of it all. What'll they think of next?
Individuals have only started purchasing software at retail within the last ten years or so.
Huh? Do you have some data to back that up?
A LOT of individuals bought PCs, Macs, Amigas, Ataris, Pets,TR-80s and so on up to 20 yrs ago. And bought software. Maybe MORE than now, because the machines didn't come with a few CDs filled with programs.
I guess nothing exists beyond when YOU started using computers?
Ah yes, an excellent book about fly fishing, but we were disappointed the book didn't mention the open-source movement's clearly positive effect on the size of catches.
Listen, I'm sympathetic but from the facts it's far from clear that this is a gross violation of your right to non-commercial use blah blah blah. If you really wanted to identify your wife's group clearly you might've gotten "TheYourLocationHereBarbiesSoftballTeam.com" instead, which would've been much harder for Mattel to argue against, much less to find. You did put a page up indicating a request for payment which they might've seen from DejaNews or some other outlet long after you took it down. (By the way, how can you tell a "joke" cyber-squatter from a real one? Did the page have smiley-faces all over it?) Someone at Mattel might've saved your HTML page three months ago and it took that long to get anything done. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I like Mattel playing legal games, but if you're going to play with elephants you should expect to get stepped on.
Personally I was sued by Porsche for porscheservice.com. I have a client, they service Porsches, I got them a domain name. I didn't realize it was infringing, and when I was informed of the IP law that covers it I gave it up. Still pisses me off, but that's the law in that case.
Am I the only one a wee bit suspicious about this? Sounds to me like he thought he could get them to rollover for a big wad and is now trying to re-direct the damage. If you're going to take a name which includes a name that's heavily trademarked and protected you're asking for it. Even if this is all true where do you think his wife got the idea for "Mondo Barbie"? From Barbie her hairdresser or Barbie the dolls they all played with when they were kids?
Slashdot Mirror
You know, posts like this really renew my interest in coming to SlashDot. After wading thru all the dreck, bad spelling, OS and license wars, once in awhile somebody lays out a nice intelligent argument. Somebody please mod this guy up!
wouldn't brag about the development environment: it's torture.
Interesting viewpoint, considering it's actually their development environment that's responsible for a lot of their success. They've consistently managed to draw developers to their platform, and one of the reasons is they make it ever-easier to produce apps. Now this doesn't appeal to the "let's make it hard and obscure as possible so we can show we're men" crowd, but to the people who actually have to produce a slick-looking app for the marketing dept. in no time it works all day.
At least people in an ideal communist state are treated as individuals
Unfortunately we don't seem to have any ideal communist states. Please see the World Trade Bank refusal to find China for telling 50k farmers to move to Tibet. Our government might tell people they have to move, but wouldn't tell them where.
In democracy, the majority rules, and the individual is sacrificed.
Well the individual's vote may not be the wasy it goes, but you can always run for office yourself. Let's face it, any lousy actor or governor can do it if they try hard enough.
Unfourtunately, people who consume more are not happier than people who are poor.
No, but they have much better toys.
but I try not to judge people based on whether they are good workers
I'm down with that in a basic Buddhist way, but if you think back to a time when there was only one guy in the village who made shoes, one who grew wheat, etc. you may consider that producing enough of your specialty for the group probably equated pretty well with being "good" in a help-out not-see-people-without-shoes-on kinda way.
> braking into the codes
I think the code was standing still at the time, and would not require any braking action to slow it down.
This is EXACTLY the kind of thing the successor to the KGB mandates in every Russian ISP. So what's the difference? The FBI guys wear white hats? These people need to be stopped NOW. With this in place, any individual even making a joke about drugs, politics or blowing up Congress in email will be susceptible to surveillance and harassment. Once they have your name in their little (big!) file they're NOT going to delete it, and you can look forward to a life under surveillance. The concept that 270 million people need to be searched in order to capture the tiny percentage of the population who are terrorists and drug dealers and child porno's is morally and intellectually bankrupt. They might as well just do mandatory house-to-house searches.
Maybe we will start seeing Red china harassing windows users as being Members of the Evil Microsoft Cult.
Actually if their main concern is security they may indeed forbid the use of Windows, especially if connected to a network, saying that it may send info back to MS or the NSA. It wouldn't matter of course that none of that could be proved (like go ahead and use it and we'll watch with a packet sniffer), but the rulers there never required much in the way of facts to buttress their positions anyway. They just make the policy (no Falun Gong) and imprison and kill people who violate it. (You know, like the US does with the "War on Drugs".)
So, we will eventually see people turning into martyrs for Windows!
The headlines will read "2000 Chinese businessmen today were rounded up and taken to a re-education center as a result of their insistence on continuing to use Word and Excel on a Windows 95 system. One miscreant said: 'But I need my address book!' and was promptly beaten with a Red Flag CD."
Could it be, that by arbitrarily defining their "billing cycle" NSI is able to hold on to domains that have been expired for years.
No, it's just people writing Slashdot stories without taking 2 minutes to research the question. Why bother to do that when you can make a conspiracy out of it, eh?
The billing cycle is a year of course, as anyone who's ever registered a domain or bothered to read the payment policy should know. Duh.
No, I'm sure the drugs were better. But I can't really remember. That's why I'm sure...
Hey, you've equated an unwillingness to turn my daily schedule upside-down by not car pooling (or whatever behaviour you deem as necessary) with membership in one of the most hated and evil empires the earth has ever seen. That's wholly inappropriate and trivializes one of the worst episodes of the 20th century. If you hold these opinions and you're not a hypocrite then get to some nice bush-hut in the Kalahari. (sp?) Otherwise you're just as guilty as anyone.
Yes, there is a real world with shades of grey, in which harm is caused inadvertently, and you're perfectly willing to accuse the 97% of the populace that doesn't car pool of being as bad as the Nazis, no matter what ELSE they may do to help the environment. That's exactly the kind of rhetoric that hurts the ecology movement in this country. Did you consider that in the "inadvertent harm" you mentioned?
Well, then I might as well say you're worse than Mussolini. I mean, what the hell, call a fascist a fascist, right? Behaviour that your don't like, no matter the practical reality, is tantamount to being a freakin' Nazi.
As it happens, I work at home, do you? Do you take a bike everyday to work? Make your own shoes out of dead animal skins? You can't possibly be an ecological activist if you use computers, the making of which requires vast amounts of nasty chemicals.
Come on, where do you draw the line? At what point of primitism do you get before you're not responsible for world destruction? How do you justify existence in a developed country at all?
You want to be a condescending hypocrite, fine. Like I said originally, we don't need any more judgemental assholes. Have a nice day.
Again, you guys aren't EVER interested in reality, not as long as you can go karma-whoring with your "holier-than-thou" attitude.
Public transportation and car pooling are NOT an option where I live. It just doesn't work for most people. That doesn't make them bad people, or any less concerned with the environment.
While I don't yet claim that unwillingness to carpool is morally equivalent to tacit cooperation with the Third Reich (I hadn't mentioned the Holocaust) I do claim that the fact that most people base their daily choices on local concerns rather than broader ones is responsible for both facts.
Not Yet? Oh good, because I get so annoyed after reading messages from the self-appointed guardians of all-that's-good-and-noble that I just have to go out for a long drive. I'd take the small car, but the big one is in front of the garage and it's an inconvenience to open it.
I am a Grown Up in my thirties who knows LOTS of people who juggle careers and family
Well, good. Then you know how stupid it is to expect them all to car pool. Personally I don't have kids (and in fact, work at home) but I really can't see my former co-workers all car pooling. In fact, in New Jersey they closed the HOV lanes because it actually caused MORE pollution by tying up traffic even worse.
There's a differencing between moralizing and observing, and when the latter is demonized as the former, God help us all.
The "moralizing" was obviously in reference to the original post, which is exactly what he was doing.
that we at least nominally consider sub-optimal
Well, actually not everyone believes that, but around here that dogma is generally accepted, yes. Just as is the attitude of the original poster that developers and businesses who don't accept the open-source "way" are all clueless. I'm saying that attitude is myopic and judgemental, and keeps a lot of valuable ideas and people out of the little boys club that the "open source community" seems to be. (I'm talking perceptions here folks, and that is at least one of the mainstream perceptions of open source AND SlashDot.)
And I'm sorry, but I don't know how you can mention the Third Riech without conjuring up the Holocaust. And I still don't know why you would, general pessima or not. Again, it shows an alarming lack of perspective.
Ok, so unwillingness to car pool == moral equivalence to going along with the Holocaust? Because you think using gas dooms the world? Can you say "lack of perspective"? Do you know any real people juggling schedules to take care of their kids and businesses? And if not, why not?
Electric utilities are one of the biggest users of carbon fuels and polluters - you gonna turn your computers off?
I didn't think so. In fact, all the traditional toys of "geeks", all the electronics and plastics those evil corporate bastards make for us are about the worst thing we as humans could be producing in terms of their environmental impact. Gonna throw away your MP3 player, stereo, cell phone? And if you did, guess what - no matter how much recycling you do, they're not exactly biodegradable.
What pushed my button was the constant moralizing of technology and rampant stereotyping of anyone not living for Linux.
Yes, you're absolutely right. How shameful I feel! And I keep justifying my use of fuel oil to heat my house even! Who are we to live in these heated houses and apartment buildings? It ruins the natural order. I say, leave all building materials in their natural state! Do the right thing! Sure, some of us will freeze to death, but that'll reduce our burden on Mother Earth. Take my blanket brother! We'll all live in one big tent, imagine the energy we'll save. For the future! For the children!
What amazes you? Reality? That there are people who work 30-60 miles from home? That there may be people who don't like their co-workers? That some people smoke in their cars? (You'll love my cigars. Really.) The limited amount of time in any given day? People with kids and disparate schedules? What aspect of all that are you having a problem with?
There are a lot of ways to save energy "for the future". Solar doesn't work where I am; windmills could help. But when I have to drive to see a client, I'm not taking a freaking party with me.
It just comes right down to daily life concerns for these people. They want to make the most money they can, spend it in the manner they choose, and they're not really about supporting causes unless it's an easy cause to support. You know the kind of people I mean: they recycle their trash, but they don't carpool.
:-)
You know, I'm sure you're a really decent guy just communicating his larger-than-average social conciousness, but this comes off as so judgemental and ignorant of most peoples' reality, it's a great reflection of the whole "movement".
How terrible - people who are just trying to make a living and don't give a fig about RMS and the GPL. I guess you just have to feel sorry for 'em. Don't even carpool! OHMIGOD! The cretins!
REALITYCHECK
Yeah, the trip to work is 45 minutes, I'll definitely want to add another 30 min to that by stopping by and picking up the gang. To support somebody's cause. No problem. Especially knowing that Joe often has to leave early to pick up his daughter, and Bill stays late to do his manager thing, and Hector and Alex eat lunch at 11:30 while I can't really eat until 1pm at least. And if Robert prefers to spend his lunch hour browsing at the bookstore, well that's too bad.
And I have a two-seater.
/REALITYCHECK
Hey, what about jesus-online.com? They use that to point "Christians" to their page! I guess they figure Jesus can't sue...
Remember when you didn't like beer??
:-)
Yes, but that's only because it was Budwieser.
Kimchee grows on you after a while
Maybe, but I had a friend who kept telling me I'd eventually like sushi. That was in '85. Hasn't happened yet.
Providing they created them with PhotoShop or something else which DID pay the licensing fees, why would they have to? As I understand it UNISYS can't touch anyone as long as they used a licensed implementation of a graphics program.
Um, can I pick a religion where I'm guaranteed eternal life with lots of redheads? And short brunettes? And... and....
I mean, as long as we're just shopping, you know, what the hell. So to speak.
Scanning, in and of itself, is not an attack
:-)
Quite true, and we'll all be in trouble if Congress decides to make it illegal! I envision a license in the future...
On the other hand, most of the port scans I get end up in a SYN flood. I don't take any action until I check it out because I have had situations where it was somebody else's box that was temporarily hijacked, but I can see taking a hard-line attitude with it. Especially when you check on 'em and their domain is something like is-a-hacker.de
Some people use Debian because it's better, not because it's the most free.
Then again, we could say that about any one of a number of operating systems, but if the name doesn't start with 'L' they and their makers get trashed by "the community" (as defined by the first hundred rabid SlashDot posts.)
Imagine, the notion that you'd use a system that works best for your situation, regardless of the "free-ness" of it all. What'll they think of next?
Individuals have only started purchasing software at retail within the last ten years or so.
Huh? Do you have some data to back that up?
A LOT of individuals bought PCs, Macs, Amigas, Ataris, Pets,TR-80s and so on up to 20 yrs ago. And bought software. Maybe MORE than now, because the machines didn't come with a few CDs filled with programs.
I guess nothing exists beyond when YOU started using computers?
phhhffftttt.
Ah yes, an excellent book about fly fishing, but we were disappointed the book didn't mention the open-source movement's clearly positive effect on the size of catches.
Listen, I'm sympathetic but from the facts it's far from clear that this is a gross violation of your right to non-commercial use blah blah blah. If you really wanted to identify your wife's group clearly you might've gotten "TheYourLocationHereBarbiesSoftballTeam.com" instead, which would've been much harder for Mattel to argue against, much less to find. You did put a page up indicating a request for payment which they might've seen from DejaNews or some other outlet long after you took it down. (By the way, how can you tell a "joke" cyber-squatter from a real one? Did the page have smiley-faces all over it?) Someone at Mattel might've saved your HTML page three months ago and it took that long to get anything done. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I like Mattel playing legal games, but if you're going to play with elephants you should expect to get stepped on.
Personally I was sued by Porsche for porscheservice.com. I have a client, they service Porsches, I got them a domain name. I didn't realize it was infringing, and when I was informed of the IP law that covers it I gave it up. Still pisses me off, but that's the law in that case.
Am I the only one a wee bit suspicious about this? Sounds to me like he thought he could get them to rollover for a big wad and is now trying to re-direct the damage. If you're going to take a name which includes a name that's heavily trademarked and protected you're asking for it. Even if this is all true where do you think his wife got the idea for "Mondo Barbie"? From Barbie her hairdresser or Barbie the dolls they all played with when they were kids?
Maybe I'm just too cynical.... nah.