I don't think I've ever seen the phrase "right-wing tree hugger" before. Usually the right wing is very sympathetic to the concerns of the tobacco lobby-- under the auspices that smoking tobacco in public is a right. Nevermind their contradictory war on drugs, which makes it illegal to smoke another popular plant even in private.
On the other hand, tree huggers often smoke just as much as anyone of other political stripes. In fact, there are whole cigarette brands geared to this market.
I think the distinction you seek is "those humans who are really damn tired of breathing in smoke they can't control" versus "inconsiderate smokers". This latter group does not appear to include you, which is wonderful. How nice it would be if other smokers were as thoughtful as you are.
How does the MSDN subscription thing work into getting developers on board with not only MS OS, but MS development tools, as well as all the other software they produce? I have seen developers recommend MS products in situations where they may or may not have been ideal, simply because they had either warezed versions or already had access via this MSDN thing.
I don't need to realize that. I'm already fully aware of that. The suggestion was to deface the MPAA website, which has nothing to do with helping people understand that digital information is no different than analog information. All it will do is help reinforce the notion that geeks are lawless twerps, so whatever they want to do should probably be illegal.
By the way, the ACLU is already actively involved in the DeCSS case. So I don't know how much more "on there ass" [sic] they can be. So for the record, have you written a contribution check to the EFF or the ACLU, and made a decision to be active in NOT purchasing a DVD player? I think this is probably a better solution than committing felonies only tangentially related to the unjust law. Now, nothing will prevent me from owning the DeCSS source and compiling and using it and sharing it(except the lack of DVDs to use it on). Any part of the DMCA which proscribes such activities is unjust, and those are the laws to break. Not the laws that make sense.
I think you missed his point. He says that obviously some things just can't be done by piping lots of small commands together. At least not with a screen interface.
Sure, there are utilities that will do almost any emacs thing to a file, but after editing in vi or nano do you really want to have to type all those shell commands in when a couple of keystrokes in emacs will run make or let you check your tested source back into the CVS repository? Typing C-x C-s is certainly no more difficult than doing ESC:w, is it?
Yes, emacs is large, and it has a lot of features (some of which are only useful as entertainment), but that's the point. Saying emacs is big and bloated if all you take advantage of are the text editing features is like saying a RDBMS is big and bloated if all you use it for is sorting and grouping lists. I mean, the OS itself takes forever to load compared to emacs, but no one complains about that because it does so much stuff.
That said, if you don't take advantage of any of the features that emacs offers, then no, it's not the tool for you. I have the same opinion of most of the uses I see Word put to. Incredible waste of power (and in the case of Word, money and freedom).
Why? So you can further associate the idea of free speech in technical areas with the notion of "computer criminal" in the eyes of the government, the corporations, and most importantly, in the mind of the public?
You have a good point which is obscured by the fact that you sound like a drooling reactionary or a troll.
Children are children. Absolutely. They simply do not have the same rights that adults have. Most importantly, parents have the right to tell their own children what to do. Parents usually know more than their children about everything. At least until about fifth grade, when this edge starts to degrade.
But the facts of this case are not a "do whatever" parent. This is not about a lack of discipline. It sounds like the girl's father was actively involved since the adults she used in her sample were her father's coworkers. The problem here is the fact that the school, rather than use this to properly educate people about the difference between sociology and "hard" science has decided to use censorship as a tool to suppress inquiry into a topic which makes them uncomfortable. The school has government fiat to supercede the parents' right to control their child? This is "in loco parentis" gone too far.
If there is an obvious academic issue with this science fair project, then they are being fair. Probably among a group of elementary students this project was only notable for having a hot button topic. I would guess the project requirements were vague and non-specific, and so cancelling this girl's good-faith effort to do her job as a student is not about "discipline" it's about cowardly American educators.
1. Customers would rather pay a smaller monthly amount than a single purchase price. Your subscription fees will likely be larger than the total cost of the same package divided by the number of months the average user keeps the software before buying the next version. We're going to have a startup fee, too. [ $20/month + $20 setup ]. It will sound cheaper so people will buy it. Just like they lease cars and apartments.
2. Customers want support. Well, we may as well take a note from those Free software fanatics and sell a support subscription, which must be maintained over the life of the software subscription, whether it's used or not. [ $5/month ]
3. Rollback upgrades that don't work? Yes, we admit it. Our software does not work. NOT.
4. Customers want a privacy policy. Yeah. Okay. We keep secrets well. Besides they really think they're going to file lawsuits when we have a human error that lets some private data slip?
5. Subscribers want CDS. Here. [$5/month or $50 one time fee]
6. Transfer licenses between computers. No. You'll be bringing your old computer in for a trade. A service tech (i.e. "high school senior") will perform the transfer of old data to new system. We keep and wipe your old computer. [ $100 rebate for trade-in computer, $100 for service fee, net $0 ]
7. Off a discount for multiple PC households. This is a good point, a lot of families are getting a second PC. Tell you what. We'll forego the setup fee on your second computer. Same monthly subscription cost [$20/month].
Actually, you probably don't have a right to download mp3s of music you already own. You certainly do (in the US at least) have a right to create your own backups from the media you own. But I've never seen anything in the Fair Use clauses of the copyright law that indicated to me that third parties were allowed to supply you with copies (especially having not verified your right to such copies) of media you own, but were derived wholly from separate sources.
That said, I think the infringement in this case is on the part of distributors of mp3s, not on the recipients. If I'm listening to a radio station that does not pay its ASCAP/BMI bill, am I liable for damages? Of course not, I have no way of knowing that they have no right to play songs on the air. But in the case of Napster, I can see myself being liable, since it is well-known that no one distributing files via Napster is paying royalties.
That said, arresting people for copying music is INSANE. The dollar value of damage in any one person's case cannot be enough to cause such an extreme reaction to the so-called crime. Royalties are typically pennies per play, and you would have to have an awful lot of uploads to even get to a point where the infringement was financially serious enough to warrant more than a traffic ticket level of enforcement. This is barely a small claims case if these same napster-users were to vandalize my property, so why are the Gestapo marching into their homes, seizing their property and using the media circus to brand them as criminals.
So while we're whining about a binary incompatibility issue that is well known and been discussed to death, can we add in pleas for venduhs of commercial proprietary everpresent software (like Shockwave/Flash and PDF) to please start recompiling every piece of software they make/release for each architecture as well as each version of Red Hat? I can't begin to recall all the times I've downloaded a "linux" version of something for my PPC that didn't work. And don't even get me started on source distributions that don't compile from source because the developers don't seem worried about protability in the least.
The age old wisdom of pick the software you want to run, then find a system that runs that software applies here.
bzzt! wrong! Although I was joking, now I shall have to elaborate... from dictionary.com:
groupware n : software that can be used by a group of people who are working on the same information but may be distributed in space.
emacs reportedly has email, calendaring, newsgroup reading, and a text editor (the only part I've used). What part of this relates specifically to software development or limits it to that one use? CVS stands for concurrent version system. Again, nothing to do with source code per se. You could just as easily organize your recipes, project plans, websites, or little black book using both of the aforementioned tools.
Actually, I can no longer tell the difference between any of the non-Best Buy stores. And the only reason Best Buy is distinguishable is that big ugly yellow price tag.
Microsoft brought down? When the flipping heck did this happen? Last time I checked they still had the only preinstalled OS available at Best Buy, Computer City, and other major consumer grade PC retailers.
The legislators ATMs are owned and operated by Credit Unions, at which I suspect most legislators have the bulk of their transactional accounts. Those are not special ATMs owned banks that just have mysteriously forgotten about the surcharge.
As a bank customer, I never pay surcharges either. Because I only use ATMs owned by the bank at which I am a customer. The ATMs are private property of the bank and there is no law requiring banks to provide them anywhere. The fact that you can withdraw money from Bank B's ATM when you are a customer of Bank A is a service being provided to you by Bank B. The fact that Bank A charges you again for the same transaction is the real problem, not that the bank providing the service (ATM) charged at the point of the transaction.
As for the speakers issue, I'm sure the legislators would get the same speakers as the rest of us, but would have a special tech lent to them by the industry to help make sure there were never any technical difficulties-- or they would get loss leader priced bids on the "professional" stuff, which is basically more expensive versions of the same things with copy-protection stuff removed (this is the crux of much of the current home vs. pro distinction)-- but they pay less.
One of the primary reasons I switched to Linux was the access to shell on my very own machine at home. With that done, I see almost no need to have remote shell access unless I am doing CGI scripting, and even then, only in a limited way, since development now happens in a much more convenient (and safe) environment.
What's concerning to me, and one of the reasons I gave in after years of sticking by, and being forced to switch ISPs during mom & pop sellouts, is the fact that in order to get DSL or cable access, one has to pay both the wire carrier AND the ISP. Which brings out the anti-competitive worst in companies like AT&T, TW, and the Bells offering DSL. They simply price a packaged line + web/mail account at one point, say $50, and then-- knowing that no local ISP can afford to or will price their web/mail at $10-- they price the line alone at something like $40.
Throw in the idea of having to deal with the hassle of two separate companies (no matter how nice and small one might be) seems distasteful compared to simply going with the lowest common denominator. And I can't see too many reasons why I would want to pay a small ISP to be involved in my transaction at all.
The fact that the legislation will be totally pointless and do nothing to actually hinder the problem as stated from flourishing will not (indeed it never has before) prevent the US government from passing laws to protect the sheep^H^H^H^H^Hcitizens from purportedly dangerous elements.
Laws against drugs, alcohol, child pornography, murder, and a host of other perceived ills have had no visible effect on the rate of the occurrence of these crimes, nor is the public predictably safer from the incidence of these acts as a result of the legislation. The best the government can do is provide sanctions for those found guilty of committing said crimes within US jurisdiction and mete out punishment.
Sometimes well-intentioned laws are used a basis for creating special classes of criminals who, once suspected of the crimes, are conveniently divorced from their normal rights as citizens (witness the drug war and the FBI/McNaughton-style sting mania).
The end result of legislation like this is to feed the general trend of Americans to be cowardly and fearful, who feel it is better to let governments and corporations make up their minds for them (because after all, if we can ban the export of munitions-grade encryption, we must have produced it, right? so we're number one! yeah!), and in this case, will make sure that no citizens, for better or worse, will be keeping any secrets which would undermine that authority and control.
Always nice to know that lobbyists won't be paying that extra $1.50 to get their money before they go greasing the palms of the politicos with it.
Or maybe you are referring to the fact that these machines are operated by credit unions, which, when associated with government, tend to fall on the side of allowing access.
You still haven't explained why it would more convenient to seek out a government-operated ATM to avoid a fee than it is to simply seek out an ATM owned by the bank at which the customer has his/her account.
Certainly if large banks are in the habit of stiffing people it is not without the complete cooperation of the government itself. I mean, have you ever tried to wade through banking regulations? Good luck just getting started by deciding which government agency is actually relevant to which financial institution. And then, who the oversight branch is. Is it Congress... is it the Treasury department? If after doing that, you still think the largely rich members of government give a rip about a $2 fee which they have conveniently set up a way to avoid having to pay themselves, then well....
To quote George Carlin on the topic of airport security: "The whole thing is fucking pointless... there are no bombs." He goes on to say that the primary motivation appears to be that they want to remind us all that they can fuck with us whenever they want-- as long as we'll put up with it.
I know he's being funny, but it's funny because it's so truthful. And it brings up an important question, "How is it going to look if _I_ don't put up with it, but everyone else does?"
Of course the story was rejected. We need only one MS-centric post here per day (and it helps if it has a decidedly anti-MS flame quality to it). The Slashdot crew know you are going to crow about any rejected MS stories-- especially those that purport to make MS look good (although when I saw that article it further indicated to me that MS just doesn't get it, maybe some people there do, but it's not in their corporate genes). So Slashdot editors can save themselves the hassle of writing up and approving the story by simpling waiting for you to link it in the discussion of some other MS article. Consider it a cultural hack and a bona fide benefit to "open media".
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I've ever seen the phrase "right-wing tree hugger" before. Usually the right wing is very sympathetic to the concerns of the tobacco lobby-- under the auspices that smoking tobacco in public is a right. Nevermind their contradictory war on drugs, which makes it illegal to smoke another popular plant even in private.
On the other hand, tree huggers often smoke just as much as anyone of other political stripes. In fact, there are whole cigarette brands geared to this market.
I think the distinction you seek is "those humans who are really damn tired of breathing in smoke they can't control" versus "inconsiderate smokers". This latter group does not appear to include you, which is wonderful. How nice it would be if other smokers were as thoughtful as you are.
How does the MSDN subscription thing work into getting developers on board with not only MS OS, but MS development tools, as well as all the other software they produce? I have seen developers recommend MS products in situations where they may or may not have been ideal, simply because they had either warezed versions or already had access via this MSDN thing.
I don't need to realize that. I'm already fully aware of that. The suggestion was to deface the MPAA website, which has nothing to do with helping people understand that digital information is no different than analog information. All it will do is help reinforce the notion that geeks are lawless twerps, so whatever they want to do should probably be illegal.
By the way, the ACLU is already actively involved in the DeCSS case. So I don't know how much more "on there ass" [sic] they can be. So for the record, have you written a contribution check to the EFF or the ACLU, and made a decision to be active in NOT purchasing a DVD player? I think this is probably a better solution than committing felonies only tangentially related to the unjust law. Now, nothing will prevent me from owning the DeCSS source and compiling and using it and sharing it(except the lack of DVDs to use it on). Any part of the DMCA which proscribes such activities is unjust, and those are the laws to break. Not the laws that make sense.
I think you missed his point. He says that obviously some things just can't be done by piping lots of small commands together. At least not with a screen interface.
:w, is it?
Sure, there are utilities that will do almost any emacs thing to a file, but after editing in vi or nano do you really want to have to type all those shell commands in when a couple of keystrokes in emacs will run make or let you check your tested source back into the CVS repository? Typing C-x C-s is certainly no more difficult than doing ESC
Yes, emacs is large, and it has a lot of features (some of which are only useful as entertainment), but that's the point. Saying emacs is big and bloated if all you take advantage of are the text editing features is like saying a RDBMS is big and bloated if all you use it for is sorting and grouping lists. I mean, the OS itself takes forever to load compared to emacs, but no one complains about that because it does so much stuff.
That said, if you don't take advantage of any of the features that emacs offers, then no, it's not the tool for you. I have the same opinion of most of the uses I see Word put to. Incredible waste of power (and in the case of Word, money and freedom).
Why? So you can further associate the idea of free speech in technical areas with the notion of "computer criminal" in the eyes of the government, the corporations, and most importantly, in the mind of the public?
I'm with you, like 1,000 %. :)
Faith is not only invalid during scientific inquiry, but involves (typically) circular reasoning so that any assertion is self-proving.
Thank you for using bold face type. Your assertions are much more believable now that you've indicated that you're emphatic about them. :)
This is such an obvious troll. Did Signal 11 get bored being an AC?
You have a good point which is obscured by the fact that you sound like a drooling reactionary or a troll.
Children are children. Absolutely. They simply do not have the same rights that adults have. Most importantly, parents have the right to tell their own children what to do. Parents usually know more than their children about everything. At least until about fifth grade, when this edge starts to degrade.
But the facts of this case are not a "do whatever" parent. This is not about a lack of discipline. It sounds like the girl's father was actively involved since the adults she used in her sample were her father's coworkers. The problem here is the fact that the school, rather than use this to properly educate people about the difference between sociology and "hard" science has decided to use censorship as a tool to suppress inquiry into a topic which makes them uncomfortable. The school has government fiat to supercede the parents' right to control their child? This is "in loco parentis" gone too far.
If there is an obvious academic issue with this science fair project, then they are being fair. Probably among a group of elementary students this project was only notable for having a hot button topic. I would guess the project requirements were vague and non-specific, and so cancelling this girl's good-faith effort to do her job as a student is not about "discipline" it's about cowardly American educators.
They are listening, and here's what they heard:
1. Customers would rather pay a smaller monthly amount than a single purchase price. Your subscription fees will likely be larger than the total cost of the same package divided by the number of months the average user keeps the software before buying the next version. We're going to have a startup fee, too. [ $20/month + $20 setup ]. It will sound cheaper so people will buy it. Just like they lease cars and apartments.
2. Customers want support. Well, we may as well take a note from those Free software fanatics and sell a support subscription, which must be maintained over the life of the software subscription, whether it's used or not. [ $5/month ]
3. Rollback upgrades that don't work? Yes, we admit it. Our software does not work. NOT.
4. Customers want a privacy policy. Yeah. Okay. We keep secrets well. Besides they really think they're going to file lawsuits when we have a human error that lets some private data slip?
5. Subscribers want CDS. Here. [$5/month or $50 one time fee]
6. Transfer licenses between computers. No. You'll be bringing your old computer in for a trade. A service tech (i.e. "high school senior") will perform the transfer of old data to new system. We keep and wipe your old computer. [ $100 rebate for trade-in computer, $100 for service fee, net $0 ]
7. Off a discount for multiple PC households. This is a good point, a lot of families are getting a second PC. Tell you what. We'll forego the setup fee on your second computer. Same monthly subscription cost [$20/month].
Actually, you probably don't have a right to download mp3s of music you already own. You certainly do (in the US at least) have a right to create your own backups from the media you own. But I've never seen anything in the Fair Use clauses of the copyright law that indicated to me that third parties were allowed to supply you with copies (especially having not verified your right to such copies) of media you own, but were derived wholly from separate sources.
That said, I think the infringement in this case is on the part of distributors of mp3s, not on the recipients. If I'm listening to a radio station that does not pay its ASCAP/BMI bill, am I liable for damages? Of course not, I have no way of knowing that they have no right to play songs on the air. But in the case of Napster, I can see myself being liable, since it is well-known that no one distributing files via Napster is paying royalties.
That said, arresting people for copying music is INSANE. The dollar value of damage in any one person's case cannot be enough to cause such an extreme reaction to the so-called crime. Royalties are typically pennies per play, and you would have to have an awful lot of uploads to even get to a point where the infringement was financially serious enough to warrant more than a traffic ticket level of enforcement. This is barely a small claims case if these same napster-users were to vandalize my property, so why are the Gestapo marching into their homes, seizing their property and using the media circus to brand them as criminals.
So while we're whining about a binary incompatibility issue that is well known and been discussed to death, can we add in pleas for venduhs of commercial proprietary everpresent software (like Shockwave/Flash and PDF) to please start recompiling every piece of software they make/release for each architecture as well as each version of Red Hat? I can't begin to recall all the times I've downloaded a "linux" version of something for my PPC that didn't work. And don't even get me started on source distributions that don't compile from source because the developers don't seem worried about protability in the least.
The age old wisdom of pick the software you want to run, then find a system that runs that software applies here.
bzzt! wrong! Although I was joking, now I shall have to elaborate... from dictionary.com:
groupware n : software that can be used by a group of people who are working on the same information but may be distributed in space.
emacs reportedly has email, calendaring, newsgroup reading, and a text editor (the only part I've used). What part of this relates specifically to software development or limits it to that one use? CVS stands for concurrent version system. Again, nothing to do with source code per se. You could just as easily organize your recipes, project plans, websites, or little black book using both of the aforementioned tools.
Actually, I can no longer tell the difference between any of the non-Best Buy stores. And the only reason Best Buy is distinguishable is that big ugly yellow price tag.
So you're saying they've taken and copied the functionality of emacs and cvs?
who is "they"? the following distributions all run on PPC: debian, suse, and yellowdoglinux.
Microsoft brought down? When the flipping heck did this happen? Last time I checked they still had the only preinstalled OS available at Best Buy, Computer City, and other major consumer grade PC retailers.
An excellent complementary notion. Thanks.
The legislators ATMs are owned and operated by Credit Unions, at which I suspect most legislators have the bulk of their transactional accounts. Those are not special ATMs owned banks that just have mysteriously forgotten about the surcharge.
As a bank customer, I never pay surcharges either. Because I only use ATMs owned by the bank at which I am a customer. The ATMs are private property of the bank and there is no law requiring banks to provide them anywhere. The fact that you can withdraw money from Bank B's ATM when you are a customer of Bank A is a service being provided to you by Bank B. The fact that Bank A charges you again for the same transaction is the real problem, not that the bank providing the service (ATM) charged at the point of the transaction.
As for the speakers issue, I'm sure the legislators would get the same speakers as the rest of us, but would have a special tech lent to them by the industry to help make sure there were never any technical difficulties-- or they would get loss leader priced bids on the "professional" stuff, which is basically more expensive versions of the same things with copy-protection stuff removed (this is the crux of much of the current home vs. pro distinction)-- but they pay less.
One of the primary reasons I switched to Linux was the access to shell on my very own machine at home. With that done, I see almost no need to have remote shell access unless I am doing CGI scripting, and even then, only in a limited way, since development now happens in a much more convenient (and safe) environment.
What's concerning to me, and one of the reasons I gave in after years of sticking by, and being forced to switch ISPs during mom & pop sellouts, is the fact that in order to get DSL or cable access, one has to pay both the wire carrier AND the ISP. Which brings out the anti-competitive worst in companies like AT&T, TW, and the Bells offering DSL. They simply price a packaged line + web/mail account at one point, say $50, and then-- knowing that no local ISP can afford to or will price their web/mail at $10-- they price the line alone at something like $40.
Throw in the idea of having to deal with the hassle of two separate companies (no matter how nice and small one might be) seems distasteful compared to simply going with the lowest common denominator. And I can't see too many reasons why I would want to pay a small ISP to be involved in my transaction at all.
The fact that the legislation will be totally pointless and do nothing to actually hinder the problem as stated from flourishing will not (indeed it never has before) prevent the US government from passing laws to protect the sheep^H^H^H^H^Hcitizens from purportedly dangerous elements.
Laws against drugs, alcohol, child pornography, murder, and a host of other perceived ills have had no visible effect on the rate of the occurrence of these crimes, nor is the public predictably safer from the incidence of these acts as a result of the legislation. The best the government can do is provide sanctions for those found guilty of committing said crimes within US jurisdiction and mete out punishment.
Sometimes well-intentioned laws are used a basis for creating special classes of criminals who, once suspected of the crimes, are conveniently divorced from their normal rights as citizens (witness the drug war and the FBI/McNaughton-style sting mania).
The end result of legislation like this is to feed the general trend of Americans to be cowardly and fearful, who feel it is better to let governments and corporations make up their minds for them (because after all, if we can ban the export of munitions-grade encryption, we must have produced it, right? so we're number one! yeah!), and in this case, will make sure that no citizens, for better or worse, will be keeping any secrets which would undermine that authority and control.
Always nice to know that lobbyists won't be paying that extra $1.50 to get their money before they go greasing the palms of the politicos with it.
Or maybe you are referring to the fact that these machines are operated by credit unions, which, when associated with government, tend to fall on the side of allowing access.
You still haven't explained why it would more convenient to seek out a government-operated ATM to avoid a fee than it is to simply seek out an ATM owned by the bank at which the customer has his/her account.
Certainly if large banks are in the habit of stiffing people it is not without the complete cooperation of the government itself. I mean, have you ever tried to wade through banking regulations? Good luck just getting started by deciding which government agency is actually relevant to which financial institution. And then, who the oversight branch is. Is it Congress... is it the Treasury department? If after doing that, you still think the largely rich members of government give a rip about a $2 fee which they have conveniently set up a way to avoid having to pay themselves, then well....
To quote George Carlin on the topic of airport security: "The whole thing is fucking pointless... there are no bombs." He goes on to say that the primary motivation appears to be that they want to remind us all that they can fuck with us whenever they want-- as long as we'll put up with it.
I know he's being funny, but it's funny because it's so truthful. And it brings up an important question, "How is it going to look if _I_ don't put up with it, but everyone else does?"
Of course the story was rejected. We need only one MS-centric post here per day (and it helps if it has a decidedly anti-MS flame quality to it). The Slashdot crew know you are going to crow about any rejected MS stories-- especially those that purport to make MS look good (although when I saw that article it further indicated to me that MS just doesn't get it, maybe some people there do, but it's not in their corporate genes). So Slashdot editors can save themselves the hassle of writing up and approving the story by simpling waiting for you to link it in the discussion of some other MS article. Consider it a cultural hack and a bona fide benefit to "open media".
And here I thought having to use MS every day for the last several years would qualify me to speak to its poor quality. Silly me.