No. I am not proposing that school be a child's home, year-round. While I agree that there is a need to work on parents, I don't really think convincing more women to be stay-at-home moms while their children are young is a winning battle right now (and actually it's easy if the children are infants, but as soon as the kid can take care of itself the idea that parents should be there as much tends to slip). And if you think there is a strong movement for stay-at-home dads, then I'd also like to know what color you'd like your bridge. The simple fact is that most jobs require parents to be away from home-- something I think is fairly recent in human history.
I am proposing that school be much less separate from the rest of the world, less run by bells and regimentation, and less likely to consume a child's entire day. Parents have never before in history been such the singular focus of raising children-- except perhaps in farming communities, even there you see large extended families all sharing daily life. If you look at history, most children have spent their days interacting with plenty of adults besides their nuclear mom and dad. There is no precedent for this "raise your children in a nuclear family vacuum" notion and it is dangerous. If society wants these children to grow up to be members of society then society must take an active interest in children. We shouldn't be walling children off in schools all day and we shouldn't expect parents to take major economic hits at the same time in life when they need the money the most.
I don't agree that long summer breaks are useful for anything. Especially given the trends towards double-earner homes where children are increasingly less supervised or simply shuttled to care centers which deprive them of any of the real benefits of a summer vacation. I certainly don't think much of ultraregimented schooling to begin with, I thought my bias was pretty obvious (any and all lecture classes should be eligible for some sort of testing out). And I think a proper school environment would be nothing like being "locked in" anywhere.
One of my major complaints with most schools is age segregation. It's not useful. It stigmatizes brilliant students (or at least bores them) and it stresses the less apt. Given that most kids are average this isn't a huge problem, but it remains. Even worse is the notion that your friends have to be your own age. The segregation that occurs due to the notion that children should only socialize with other kids their age is a major handicap. Society has people of all ages in it and children seem to be increasingly losing interaction with that (maybe it's not the case, this is just my perception).
I'm not certain I get which part of what I said was "not at all what the cited document says". It's possible for contractors, consultants, freelancers, and the like to retain control of their creative work unless a contract states otherwise-- but this is a massive grey area according to Circular 9 which states "sicne there is no precise standard for determining whether or not a work is made for hire under the first part of the definition, consultation with an attorney for legal advice may be advisable". Only a fool wouldn't write out a very specific contract in this matter, given how convoluted the copyright law is on these matters. The rights and expectations of freelancers seem to vary quite a bit depending on which creative industry is involved. Better to have it in writing and understood by all parties involved.
I think you may have this a little mixed up. Without a contract, the author of a "work for hire" retains ownership of the rights to that work. Unless the creater of a work is an employee of a company performing his or her duties of employement, a contract is normally required to deprive the creative party from their ownership over the creation. An example we often see in our lives is the professional portrait photographer, whose work we are not able to have copied without a release from the photographer-- even though it is a picture of ourselves. (Of course the photographer probably can't use the photo for much else than selling you copies either, unless you signed a model release form-- but that's a privacy issue, not a copyright issue). For more information see, US Copyright Office FAQ especially #35. There is a link in the FAQ to a PDF called "Circular 9" which goes in depth about work for hire.
I agree. The children I see in my neighborhood who cause the most trouble are the same ones whose parents are least interested in actual parenting. Parenting includes more than taking your kids to activities or buying them toys. It is about communicating real values.
I also think our school system is a massive failure. Someone else on this thread suggested that we not extend the school year into the summer, but ban school entirely. I disagree. I think that school should be year-round. These days, kids who have the summer off are completely on their own after about age 10. Those kids who aren't own their own are doomed to a day in a daycare, which is a stultifyingly structured unproductive environment.
But on that same note, past sixth grade, no kids should be in school for more than four hours a day. They should be working at internships and part time jobs... and not fscking fast food, but assisting in adding value to the world and learning to do something (or a variety of somethings) useful at the same time. This should be part of their educational experience and not additive as it is now. It should be coordinated and fairly compulsory. They should be treated with respect and given real responsibilities. Sure, there is still room for activities like sports and debate teams, and all that. But get a kid with a math bent a job in an actuarial firm or a bank or a science lab, and she'll never be stuck in a room with 29 other kids whose primary question is "what good is this junk?" Also, this gives kids an honest chance to see what jobs and work are like.
Further bonus: one of the frequent arguments against homeschooling is the supposed lack of social skill practice. Well, what kind of social skill practice is it to sit in a room of 30 kids listening to some adult drone? How to learn to actually interact in a civilized manner when you're surrounded by other children? School is missing some major lessons that life has to offer and serves to do little more than keep most kids age 12-21 in a kind of social holding tank.
This is the only sensible post so far in this entire thread.
I use GAIM (apparently with TOC and not OSCAR) to communicate with a very small group of relatives-- other than this if I want social interaction I'll head to FICS, IRC, or even some HTTP based chats. While I don't use AIM, my contacts do-- because I suggested it, and I suggested it because of GAIM, not because of AIM for Linux-- until they release a PPC binary I literally cannot use an official client on the machine I use to chat.
Of course, TOC still works, and as long as it does, I'm not overly stressed by AOL's changes to the OSCAR servers. But if they go for TOC any time soon, then they will have certainly changed my mind-- and acted not only out of greed, but from a complete lack of ethics.
I've never seen a disclosure of that type in any "responsible" print journal, nor in their online versions. Typically, it is assumed that advertising and editorial policy are not intertwined. In fact, including information that they are a primary advertiser on the site might imply that financial considerations had colored the presentation.
You're kidding right? I run a fully graphic workstation on a laptop with 48mb RAM, a P/133 CPU, and (well, this wasn't necessary, but it has it anyway) a 4gb HD. I'd say that since I keep all my HD-intensive data on other larger drives, that the system fits in well under 2gb of my HD. And that's with full postgreSQL, Apache, and god knows what else installed. I used to run and compile KDE2 on that machine, but got tired of how slow that was... but it runs Enlightenment and most gtk-based applications just fine.
That sounds incredibly time consumptive and a huge waste of plastic (which has my pseudo-environmentalist hackles raised). If you really want to hurt the record companies and enjoy music, go buy a fscking instrument and play your own damn music!
A book can be cross-listed in a card catalog, from my understanding, but since the book can only be in one place on the shelf, it's not a big concern. The librarian simply chooses the dominant topic, or uses one of 000 general classes (for things like encyclopedias, periodicals, etc).
Keywords are not especially helpful in auto-creating directories. They are of limited value because only about 10% of web sites use them at all. Of those that do use them, there is no limit or structure to them. They are easily spammed. This is exactly why they were discarded as useful by SEs a long time ago. I have found keywords and descriptions helpful in my own efforts at classifying web pages because, once verified by a human (me), they could be used as a partial basis for text based searches (in which I also included META descriptions). If no keywords were given I frequently resorted to duplicating the description. If keywords were given, but no description, I could usually find a short excerpt from the site that could be copied and pasted.
Open Directory works rather well, IMHO, as a directory because the editors have a strong sense of ownership and are given small enough chunks to do that the work is very manageable at the individual level (and they can do it in their spare time easily). But the human element is always going to be a potential issue with any directory. A problem you just don't have with Google.
I actually spent some time over the last two weeks reading at -1 and found that there were a lot of great things going on just below the "Score: 1" level. Sure there was a lot of unnecessary homophobia. But a lot of the intelligent contributions of AC's never gets modded up, simply because moderators don't browse at 0. I also noticed a lot of fairly reasonable posts moderated down for simply being unpopular or less sophisticated in their wording. And frankly, I can't believe that the average Slashdotter doesn't appreciate some of the better "All your beowulf cluster of natalie portmans are belong to us" jokes one sees in the 0/-1 range.
This also brings up the problem of being able to use multiple pages that are essentially redirects to get around the listing limits. For instance, I make http://www.hotgrits.com/natalie1.html,.../natalie2.html,.../natalie3.html, etc which all are really mirrors of http://www.hotgrits.com/portman.html, which is the main page for my site. The only thing I change is the category for each page so that my site effectively shows up in numerous places in the directory. With a properly constructed CGI program I could be listed in every category without having to work that hard.
Having actually tried to implement a DDC based web directory once, I am familiar with the problem that many pages would possibly fall under many categories. This is a problem with any directory-based approach, especially if you list a page in one category and then the page changes enough so that the category no longer applies.
In your example, I would hope it would not be too much trouble for you to put a different class number into the pages that make up each logical section of your site. Or if the site is small enough, it would likely fall under something like "personal web pages", which may have a number of subclasses itself, and then you'd choose the one you felt appropriate.
Again, this is a common issue among all directories, where do you put stuff? Do you allow multiple listings/classes per site/page? You still end up having to include some sort of keyword or text-based search so that users are not forced to browse the directory structure, guessing at the classification they are looking for or where it lies in the hierarchy. Text searches also allow for the possibility of searching based on content rather than metadata.
Most of this is a non-issue, given that Google seems to have rather successfully implemented a non-directory type of engine-- succeeding where Altavista was simply unwieldy. At least that's my impression. I usually find what I want with Google.
Yahoo and DMOZ are web directories. This is a very human labor intensive way to categorize the web. Google is actually a search engine. It spiders out and runs an indexing algorithm of some sort to help it respond to queries. These are very different approaches.
Yahoo and the like are doomed to failure until someone implements something like the Dewey Decimal System for web pages and then convinces a large number of webmasters to correctly classify their pages using it. That way a machine can do the hard work and only the person designing the page need do the actual work of making sure the page is classified correctly.
Obviously this is fraught with problems similar to those of keyword spamming, but it's either that or build something like DMOZ on a decentralized basis, so that any individual maintainer builds a set of links that are tailored to his/her interests and either uploads them to a central sever or provides them as an XML document for an engine to work with.
I still don't get what your issue is. If you think $15 a download (remember, we're talking about a high speed download of a very large file) is really going to fatten anyone's coffers, I think you should take a close look at offering the same service and how much it would cost you.
I still don't see how you can say such use of the software is theft. This is exactly what the GPL is designed to promote. Free software.If you find this so dastardly, you are free to use all the same software and distribute an ISO for no charge at all (good luck, my investigations lead me to believe that high availability servers and file transfers in the 650mb range require very expensive ISP accounts-- or maybe you can host it on GeoCities!). You are also free to NOT GPL your software. Maybe you should consider a license that prohibits including your software in any collection for which there is any charge whatsoever.
Free Software is a commodity. If $15 is extreme, someone else will gladly provide this same service for less charge, until we get to the point where the price of the distribution beggars anyone who tries to put one together. The only alternative is to support, both through volunteer time and through financial means, non-profit, labor-distributed projects like Debian-- which would be just fine with me.
And I've gotten solicitations addressed to both me and the dead guy who owned my house before I did. So far, I'm not worried since this seems more incompetent than anything else. The question remains, what technological means did they use to link up the completely fabricated web form with the actual real world address? Was a cookie from DoubleClick involved? How did they determine that the address given was wrong in the first place? I'm still not saying it's not real. I'm saying it's very curious. Obviously "Dr. Nick" was trying to make sure he didn't receive these solicitations by lying. So how did they see through it? If we don't figure out the answer to that, they'll continue to see through our well-intentioned lies. (As a side note, snail junk mail never bothers me. It's usually apparent from looking at it what can be thrown away and what I want to look at more closely. The worst offenders are NOW, who don't put much in the way of identifying marks on their envelopes as part of their paranoia pitch.)
They aren't pirating a damn thing. If they distribute the source code with the binaries they distribute, they are complying with the GPL in full, both with respect to the letter of the license and the intent thereof. If you have obtained a copy of a piece of GPL'ed software and would like to give it out for free, that is your business. Given the popularity of Linux, I think you will be overwhelmed by the requests you get.
Libra, like anyone else, has expenses associated with distributing the software, and is trying to make sure they can continue to do so by asking for help paying their bills. Personally, I like this approach better than the "we'll give away our main draw and make all our money on support" line. This seems a lot more realistic.
If you are angry that you have done some hard work coding a piece of software and no one is paying your bills, then stop coding. If your software is that important, I'm sure the people who value your continued efforts on their behalf will be happy to work out a way to pay you for the service of programming-- whether a consortium funds you, or a non-profit grant, or whatever. The GPL is designed to protect the users and "consumers" of software, not the producers (except that if I've gotten ahold of a piece of software that I want changes to, as a non-programmer, the only way I get changes made is by hiring programmers, so the deal doesn't look that raw to me, especially considering the rates most programmers are able to charge.)
So what piece of information could they have possibly used to determine your "correct" address when confronted with an obvious falsification? I'm not saying I don't believe that companies aren't working to make their data more accurate. Nor am I saying I don't believe you. I am saying this is a very interesting puzzle. They didn't use ESP to figure out where Dr. Nick lived, now did they? And if not, how could they possibly know that your address would work for him? Do you have a clear indication of which sites targeted you this way? I'd be very amused to see if I can duplicate your results.
You probably are getting a discount. It means that they don't have to spend nearly as much money doing market research or simply carrying stuff that no one watches. It means that if they are selling the information that they don't have to charge that much extra in subscription fees. This sort of marketing adds value because it allows the company in question to understand its customers better and work towards making your experience as a customer better. If nothing else, it hopefully makes it possible for the company to be as efficient as possible, which may not result in discounts, but it will result in less service charge hikes to cover uncontrolled costs.
The pen isn't more natural for text entry. But it works better than keyboard with mouse, imho, for pointing and "clicking", interspersed with occasional text entry. Especially if you can get a little digital keyboard up on the screen with a couple of easy "clicks". I know I'd love to have a device like this with a Palm-like interface, but with a laptop-sized screen, CPU, memory, etc. This would be very handy on airplanes, buses, trains. Places where you don't have a ton of room. This is also handy since you can hold the device in one arm while using the other to control it.
Why do you say this like AOL is some little company trying to take on the big guys (MS/Apple)? Compared to MS and Apple, AOL is a monster. They are part of Time Warner. They own magazines and television channels and cable networks and major chat protocols and a premier web browser. They have a much larger influence than MS will ever have. MS is, so far, a flash in the pan. They've only recently achieved anything resembling dominance in the office applications and OS markets. If AOL decided they needed a QuickTime player for their Linux-based internet appliance, I'm guessing the money they could pony up for this would outweigh any qualms at Apple in a darn hurry. If not, they are certainly in a position to develop one and position it as the next standard.
AOL is huge in terms of subscriber numbers and has a long history of providing connections, chats, email, and online content. They predate the popular web and email movement. If AOL produced a version of Linux designed to integrate Netscape and AOL connections, the only thing they'd need to do to completely swamp Microsoft would be to figure out a way of appeasing the demand for MS Office (vmware? wine?). The beauty of getting this type of software linked with fairly closed hardware is that no one is going to hack this box to try and load Windows on it.
Slashdot Mirror
No. I am not proposing that school be a child's home, year-round. While I agree that there is a need to work on parents, I don't really think convincing more women to be stay-at-home moms while their children are young is a winning battle right now (and actually it's easy if the children are infants, but as soon as the kid can take care of itself the idea that parents should be there as much tends to slip). And if you think there is a strong movement for stay-at-home dads, then I'd also like to know what color you'd like your bridge. The simple fact is that most jobs require parents to be away from home-- something I think is fairly recent in human history.
I am proposing that school be much less separate from the rest of the world, less run by bells and regimentation, and less likely to consume a child's entire day. Parents have never before in history been such the singular focus of raising children-- except perhaps in farming communities, even there you see large extended families all sharing daily life. If you look at history, most children have spent their days interacting with plenty of adults besides their nuclear mom and dad. There is no precedent for this "raise your children in a nuclear family vacuum" notion and it is dangerous. If society wants these children to grow up to be members of society then society must take an active interest in children. We shouldn't be walling children off in schools all day and we shouldn't expect parents to take major economic hits at the same time in life when they need the money the most.
I don't agree that long summer breaks are useful for anything. Especially given the trends towards double-earner homes where children are increasingly less supervised or simply shuttled to care centers which deprive them of any of the real benefits of a summer vacation. I certainly don't think much of ultraregimented schooling to begin with, I thought my bias was pretty obvious (any and all lecture classes should be eligible for some sort of testing out). And I think a proper school environment would be nothing like being "locked in" anywhere.
One of my major complaints with most schools is age segregation. It's not useful. It stigmatizes brilliant students (or at least bores them) and it stresses the less apt. Given that most kids are average this isn't a huge problem, but it remains. Even worse is the notion that your friends have to be your own age. The segregation that occurs due to the notion that children should only socialize with other kids their age is a major handicap. Society has people of all ages in it and children seem to be increasingly losing interaction with that (maybe it's not the case, this is just my perception).
i think you need a better example than priests and con artists. some of us are not sure what the difference there is. :)
I'm not certain I get which part of what I said was "not at all what the cited document says". It's possible for contractors, consultants, freelancers, and the like to retain control of their creative work unless a contract states otherwise-- but this is a massive grey area according to Circular 9 which states "sicne there is no precise standard for determining whether or not a work is made for hire under the first part of the definition, consultation with an attorney for legal advice may be advisable". Only a fool wouldn't write out a very specific contract in this matter, given how convoluted the copyright law is on these matters. The rights and expectations of freelancers seem to vary quite a bit depending on which creative industry is involved. Better to have it in writing and understood by all parties involved.
I think you may have this a little mixed up. Without a contract, the author of a "work for hire" retains ownership of the rights to that work. Unless the creater of a work is an employee of a company performing his or her duties of employement, a contract is normally required to deprive the creative party from their ownership over the creation. An example we often see in our lives is the professional portrait photographer, whose work we are not able to have copied without a release from the photographer-- even though it is a picture of ourselves. (Of course the photographer probably can't use the photo for much else than selling you copies either, unless you signed a model release form-- but that's a privacy issue, not a copyright issue). For more information see, US Copyright Office FAQ especially #35. There is a link in the FAQ to a PDF called "Circular 9" which goes in depth about work for hire.
I agree. The children I see in my neighborhood who cause the most trouble are the same ones whose parents are least interested in actual parenting. Parenting includes more than taking your kids to activities or buying them toys. It is about communicating real values.
I also think our school system is a massive failure. Someone else on this thread suggested that we not extend the school year into the summer, but ban school entirely. I disagree. I think that school should be year-round. These days, kids who have the summer off are completely on their own after about age 10. Those kids who aren't own their own are doomed to a day in a daycare, which is a stultifyingly structured unproductive environment.
But on that same note, past sixth grade, no kids should be in school for more than four hours a day. They should be working at internships and part time jobs... and not fscking fast food, but assisting in adding value to the world and learning to do something (or a variety of somethings) useful at the same time. This should be part of their educational experience and not additive as it is now. It should be coordinated and fairly compulsory. They should be treated with respect and given real responsibilities. Sure, there is still room for activities like sports and debate teams, and all that. But get a kid with a math bent a job in an actuarial firm or a bank or a science lab, and she'll never be stuck in a room with 29 other kids whose primary question is "what good is this junk?" Also, this gives kids an honest chance to see what jobs and work are like.
Further bonus: one of the frequent arguments against homeschooling is the supposed lack of social skill practice. Well, what kind of social skill practice is it to sit in a room of 30 kids listening to some adult drone? How to learn to actually interact in a civilized manner when you're surrounded by other children? School is missing some major lessons that life has to offer and serves to do little more than keep most kids age 12-21 in a kind of social holding tank.
This is the only sensible post so far in this entire thread.
I use GAIM (apparently with TOC and not OSCAR) to communicate with a very small group of relatives-- other than this if I want social interaction I'll head to FICS, IRC, or even some HTTP based chats. While I don't use AIM, my contacts do-- because I suggested it, and I suggested it because of GAIM, not because of AIM for Linux-- until they release a PPC binary I literally cannot use an official client on the machine I use to chat.
Of course, TOC still works, and as long as it does, I'm not overly stressed by AOL's changes to the OSCAR servers. But if they go for TOC any time soon, then they will have certainly changed my mind-- and acted not only out of greed, but from a complete lack of ethics.
I've never seen a disclosure of that type in any "responsible" print journal, nor in their online versions. Typically, it is assumed that advertising and editorial policy are not intertwined. In fact, including information that they are a primary advertiser on the site might imply that financial considerations had colored the presentation.
You're kidding right? I run a fully graphic workstation on a laptop with 48mb RAM, a P/133 CPU, and (well, this wasn't necessary, but it has it anyway) a 4gb HD. I'd say that since I keep all my HD-intensive data on other larger drives, that the system fits in well under 2gb of my HD. And that's with full postgreSQL, Apache, and god knows what else installed. I used to run and compile KDE2 on that machine, but got tired of how slow that was... but it runs Enlightenment and most gtk-based applications just fine.
That sounds incredibly time consumptive and a huge waste of plastic (which has my pseudo-environmentalist hackles raised). If you really want to hurt the record companies and enjoy music, go buy a fscking instrument and play your own damn music!
A book can be cross-listed in a card catalog, from my understanding, but since the book can only be in one place on the shelf, it's not a big concern. The librarian simply chooses the dominant topic, or uses one of 000 general classes (for things like encyclopedias, periodicals, etc).
Keywords are not especially helpful in auto-creating directories. They are of limited value because only about 10% of web sites use them at all. Of those that do use them, there is no limit or structure to them. They are easily spammed. This is exactly why they were discarded as useful by SEs a long time ago. I have found keywords and descriptions helpful in my own efforts at classifying web pages because, once verified by a human (me), they could be used as a partial basis for text based searches (in which I also included META descriptions). If no keywords were given I frequently resorted to duplicating the description. If keywords were given, but no description, I could usually find a short excerpt from the site that could be copied and pasted.
Open Directory works rather well, IMHO, as a directory because the editors have a strong sense of ownership and are given small enough chunks to do that the work is very manageable at the individual level (and they can do it in their spare time easily). But the human element is always going to be a potential issue with any directory. A problem you just don't have with Google.
Oops. I misread your post. You didn't include Sun and PowerPC in the x86 category. I'm sorry!
Except that PowerPCs are not x86 chips.
I actually spent some time over the last two weeks reading at -1 and found that there were a lot of great things going on just below the "Score: 1" level. Sure there was a lot of unnecessary homophobia. But a lot of the intelligent contributions of AC's never gets modded up, simply because moderators don't browse at 0. I also noticed a lot of fairly reasonable posts moderated down for simply being unpopular or less sophisticated in their wording. And frankly, I can't believe that the average Slashdotter doesn't appreciate some of the better "All your beowulf cluster of natalie portmans are belong to us" jokes one sees in the 0/-1 range.
This also brings up the problem of being able to use multiple pages that are essentially redirects to get around the listing limits. For instance, I make http://www.hotgrits.com/natalie1.html, .../natalie2.html, .../natalie3.html, etc which all are really mirrors of http://www.hotgrits.com/portman.html, which is the main page for my site. The only thing I change is the category for each page so that my site effectively shows up in numerous places in the directory. With a properly constructed CGI program I could be listed in every category without having to work that hard.
I never said it would be easy! :)
Having actually tried to implement a DDC based web directory once, I am familiar with the problem that many pages would possibly fall under many categories. This is a problem with any directory-based approach, especially if you list a page in one category and then the page changes enough so that the category no longer applies.
In your example, I would hope it would not be too much trouble for you to put a different class number into the pages that make up each logical section of your site. Or if the site is small enough, it would likely fall under something like "personal web pages", which may have a number of subclasses itself, and then you'd choose the one you felt appropriate.
Again, this is a common issue among all directories, where do you put stuff? Do you allow multiple listings/classes per site/page? You still end up having to include some sort of keyword or text-based search so that users are not forced to browse the directory structure, guessing at the classification they are looking for or where it lies in the hierarchy. Text searches also allow for the possibility of searching based on content rather than metadata.
Most of this is a non-issue, given that Google seems to have rather successfully implemented a non-directory type of engine-- succeeding where Altavista was simply unwieldy. At least that's my impression. I usually find what I want with Google.
Yahoo and DMOZ are web directories. This is a very human labor intensive way to categorize the web. Google is actually a search engine. It spiders out and runs an indexing algorithm of some sort to help it respond to queries. These are very different approaches.
Yahoo and the like are doomed to failure until someone implements something like the Dewey Decimal System for web pages and then convinces a large number of webmasters to correctly classify their pages using it. That way a machine can do the hard work and only the person designing the page need do the actual work of making sure the page is classified correctly.
Obviously this is fraught with problems similar to those of keyword spamming, but it's either that or build something like DMOZ on a decentralized basis, so that any individual maintainer builds a set of links that are tailored to his/her interests and either uploads them to a central sever or provides them as an XML document for an engine to work with.
I still don't get what your issue is. If you think $15 a download (remember, we're talking about a high speed download of a very large file) is really going to fatten anyone's coffers, I think you should take a close look at offering the same service and how much it would cost you.
I still don't see how you can say such use of the software is theft. This is exactly what the GPL is designed to promote. Free software.If you find this so dastardly, you are free to use all the same software and distribute an ISO for no charge at all (good luck, my investigations lead me to believe that high availability servers and file transfers in the 650mb range require very expensive ISP accounts-- or maybe you can host it on GeoCities!). You are also free to NOT GPL your software. Maybe you should consider a license that prohibits including your software in any collection for which there is any charge whatsoever.
Free Software is a commodity. If $15 is extreme, someone else will gladly provide this same service for less charge, until we get to the point where the price of the distribution beggars anyone who tries to put one together. The only alternative is to support, both through volunteer time and through financial means, non-profit, labor-distributed projects like Debian-- which would be just fine with me.
And I've gotten solicitations addressed to both me and the dead guy who owned my house before I did. So far, I'm not worried since this seems more incompetent than anything else. The question remains, what technological means did they use to link up the completely fabricated web form with the actual real world address? Was a cookie from DoubleClick involved? How did they determine that the address given was wrong in the first place? I'm still not saying it's not real. I'm saying it's very curious. Obviously "Dr. Nick" was trying to make sure he didn't receive these solicitations by lying. So how did they see through it? If we don't figure out the answer to that, they'll continue to see through our well-intentioned lies. (As a side note, snail junk mail never bothers me. It's usually apparent from looking at it what can be thrown away and what I want to look at more closely. The worst offenders are NOW, who don't put much in the way of identifying marks on their envelopes as part of their paranoia pitch.)
They aren't pirating a damn thing. If they distribute the source code with the binaries they distribute, they are complying with the GPL in full, both with respect to the letter of the license and the intent thereof. If you have obtained a copy of a piece of GPL'ed software and would like to give it out for free, that is your business. Given the popularity of Linux, I think you will be overwhelmed by the requests you get.
Libra, like anyone else, has expenses associated with distributing the software, and is trying to make sure they can continue to do so by asking for help paying their bills. Personally, I like this approach better than the "we'll give away our main draw and make all our money on support" line. This seems a lot more realistic.
If you are angry that you have done some hard work coding a piece of software and no one is paying your bills, then stop coding. If your software is that important, I'm sure the people who value your continued efforts on their behalf will be happy to work out a way to pay you for the service of programming-- whether a consortium funds you, or a non-profit grant, or whatever. The GPL is designed to protect the users and "consumers" of software, not the producers (except that if I've gotten ahold of a piece of software that I want changes to, as a non-programmer, the only way I get changes made is by hiring programmers, so the deal doesn't look that raw to me, especially considering the rates most programmers are able to charge.)
So what piece of information could they have possibly used to determine your "correct" address when confronted with an obvious falsification? I'm not saying I don't believe that companies aren't working to make their data more accurate. Nor am I saying I don't believe you. I am saying this is a very interesting puzzle. They didn't use ESP to figure out where Dr. Nick lived, now did they? And if not, how could they possibly know that your address would work for him? Do you have a clear indication of which sites targeted you this way? I'd be very amused to see if I can duplicate your results.
You probably are getting a discount. It means that they don't have to spend nearly as much money doing market research or simply carrying stuff that no one watches. It means that if they are selling the information that they don't have to charge that much extra in subscription fees. This sort of marketing adds value because it allows the company in question to understand its customers better and work towards making your experience as a customer better. If nothing else, it hopefully makes it possible for the company to be as efficient as possible, which may not result in discounts, but it will result in less service charge hikes to cover uncontrolled costs.
The pen isn't more natural for text entry. But it works better than keyboard with mouse, imho, for pointing and "clicking", interspersed with occasional text entry. Especially if you can get a little digital keyboard up on the screen with a couple of easy "clicks". I know I'd love to have a device like this with a Palm-like interface, but with a laptop-sized screen, CPU, memory, etc. This would be very handy on airplanes, buses, trains. Places where you don't have a ton of room. This is also handy since you can hold the device in one arm while using the other to control it.
Why do you say this like AOL is some little company trying to take on the big guys (MS/Apple)? Compared to MS and Apple, AOL is a monster. They are part of Time Warner. They own magazines and television channels and cable networks and major chat protocols and a premier web browser. They have a much larger influence than MS will ever have. MS is, so far, a flash in the pan. They've only recently achieved anything resembling dominance in the office applications and OS markets. If AOL decided they needed a QuickTime player for their Linux-based internet appliance, I'm guessing the money they could pony up for this would outweigh any qualms at Apple in a darn hurry. If not, they are certainly in a position to develop one and position it as the next standard.
AOL is huge in terms of subscriber numbers and has a long history of providing connections, chats, email, and online content. They predate the popular web and email movement. If AOL produced a version of Linux designed to integrate Netscape and AOL connections, the only thing they'd need to do to completely swamp Microsoft would be to figure out a way of appeasing the demand for MS Office (vmware? wine?). The beauty of getting this type of software linked with fairly closed hardware is that no one is going to hack this box to try and load Windows on it.