You never can tell. I have a sewing machine. Of course, it's a completely analog type that wouldn't work with this. However, I've been thinking the I need to write a Linux program to convert GIF files into cross-stitch patterns.
And along those lines, especially in the area of cross-stitch patterns (which for those that don't know usually consist of a grid filled with symbols to denote colors), there are widespread piracy/IP issues causing havoc in the crafts industry. The pattern makers are screaming because the advances in the internet, home scanning, etc have made it much easier to share pirated patterns which were formerly limited to xeroxing from a friend's book (and obviously lost quality after the first generation).
Actually, that's not the problem. The problem is that probably none of the beta testers would have bothered to leave this particular service enabled since there wouldn't BE any updates to check for prior to release. Sure it's an oversight, but it's not like it reformats your hard drive or allows doubleclick.net to view your persiankitty.com cookies or opens your box to a root exploit.
i can barely imagine anything i want my systems doing less than automatically looking for new software and/or installing updates without my fully conscious awareness of same and active involvement. do people actually find value in this type of service?
You've never actually had a job at a company like those described in Dilbert, have you? You've never actually read Scott Adams, except for the occasional laugh at a comic strip, have you? One must realize that Dilbert is humorous because it is an exaggeration, but it is not a pure invention. Most of the story ideas come from people who work for those large companies, or from Adams' own time as a telco employee. In fact, if you go to the Dilbert website, there is a stock index page where one index is built on the prices of the stocks of companies from which Mr. Adams says he has gotten the most ideas. Incompetence is mostly irrelevant because life is not that fragile when viewed en masse (greenhouse effect and associated theories notwithstanding). Getting up in the morning, eating, getting dressed (and I would have to argue that some are barely able to do this), moving around the planet, working in jobs that rarely require the same brainpower that it took to get past fourth grade, reproducing... these do not require an incredible amount of competence. In fact, all it takes is a few smart people to set up systems, plans, policies, and organizations, and you've got something running which will largely perpetuate itself as long as no one actually stops to question it too much, or try to change it drastically. This is not to suggest that everyone, especially bosses are morons or incompetent. But in any group, most of the people are downright average.
As I read the comments about what a crappy distro Red Hat is, and the 7.0 "fiasco", and how commercial Red Hat is compared to other distros, and brand name this-and-that, it becomes obvious that we're overlooking the obvious reason that IBM is working with Red Hat on this. Namely, that someone at IBM at some point decided that they were getting the best deal from Red Hat in terms of the combination of price and support. This decision is probably fairly unrelated to issues surrounding consumer-grade distributions for the x86 processor. Probably IBM could care less which brand of Linux they choose, since their decision does more for that brand than choosing a particular brand will help IBM sell this. Finally, Red Hat employs Alan Cox, who is a major figure in kernel development, which is the prime piece of any Linux distro that IBM is going to need (that and a compiler).
When abusing the +1 posting bonus, it should be required to attach some sort of label (like with moderation) to one's own post. That way the above poster can clearly label his/her post as "Troll" so that the rest of us won't waste our energy countering the obviously inflammatory and ignorant statements.
Those pages base a supposed lack of obligation to pay Federal Income Tax on a very bizarre redefinition of what it means to be a United States citizen. What a load. This might work in Waco, but it probably won't fly in most of the U.S.
Well, here's a quote from him, which you can find by following the above link, and following the Issues button...
Giant corporations have hijacked our democracy, have no allegiance to our country or communities, and are increasingly controlling our government, media, childhood...What other society tolerates electronic child molesting the way these corporations are targeting 4-year-olds [on TV]? They know when parents are away working. Then they market their products, undermining parental authority...junk food...violence as a solution to life's problems. People say it's up to the parents. Yeah, but who designed an economy where it takes two, three breadwinners to make a middle-class family living? These top CEOs are making 415 times the entry wage in their own company. You know what it was in 1940? 12. 1980? 40. Now, 415.
You know, Jon Katz could maybe take a hint and stop using digerati wannabe books as a starting place for social discussion and simply head to the Nader site for some launch points. After all, Nader is a Linux user!
[Looking forward to 2004, when Slashdot hosts streaming debates in the next presidential election, complete with a Questions bot and a discussion forum]
Don't real geeks download source and compile everything themselves? I mean, it's a hotrod OS, so why would I go buy the Chrysler wannabe muscle car when I can build my own from a classic frame, body, and engine block, fitting the other parts myself? And RPM/apt-get? What a wuss way to get "packages"! You people make me sick! Is tar broken? Has years of reinstalling Micros~1 binaries softened your brains?
Okay. I still don't follow what Sig11 actually proved, by posting things that people will like he proved that people will moderate them up? Isn't that a bit like proving the assumption? Where is the conclusion, I mean, thanks for the evidence to support the obvious: people will say they like things that they like. If Sig11's point is different than that, please let me know. Otherwise the whole "engineering" thing is a lot of noise.
Furthermore, and far more importantly, I think the Slashdot Cruiser is an awesome machine! I love those PT Cruisers. They are great economy cars, semi-stylish with lots of interior action. So leave the marketroids alone! The only mistake they made was not understanding how doing something pop-culturish like the Slashdot Cruiser would just upset the geeks.
I went to a big state school. This describes the experience of the general knowledge requirements classes that were taught in huge auditoriums, yes. In my major, and in other advanced classes I took, I doubt that anyone would be bothering to sell notes, or that there would be anyone who wanted to buy them. For those cases, I've assumed this debate is irrelevant, since you'd be working more closely with classmates and the professors anyway, and notes would add little to no value, since you missed participating in the class itself, which would hopefully be far more enriching than a simple reading of someone else's subjective notes on that experience.
Have you ever been in college? My experience is that the professor/TA has pretty clear notes, and that most lectures are merely them copying their notes onto an overhead or chalkboard, all the students copy that as closely as possible into notebooks, and that's it. Maybe a question/asnwer session, a little verbal jousting about exactly what's going to be on the exam. On the other hand, this is just the continued erosion of any rights one has a student, since no one seems to question this, even in college. We're already sliding down the slope at a very high rate of speed, so just consider this proper preparation for today's students for today's employment world with it's numerous NDAs, non-competes, and employee surveillance.
Americans are more than able and willing to understand metered service, we have it for everything from electricity to water to cell phones. In fact there are lots of ISPs that offer a variety of plans based on peak time usage (which affects the cost of a modem pool) which consumers can use to reduce the cost of having an internet connection. Finally, by saying the usage is "unlimited" this really twists the sense of the word. I do not have "unlimited" bandwidth if I'm connecting 24-7 through a 56k. I have 24*7*56k total available to me in any week (the formula is off, but you get the idea). It is up to me as a consumer to maximize my bandwidth usage so that I take advantage of that (unlikely that I'm going to saturate my modem line like that, no matter how hard I try). If I want more connectivity than that (per month total) or want to achieve higher transfer rates on a more discrete time basis I have to pay more for something like cable, DSL, T1, or some other better service. So really, usage is already metered. I'd say the biggest reason not to try to whittle down the $20/mth for the average 56k dialup is that I'd have to start religiously avoiding web pages with a lot of graphics, and things like that in order to end up going over my total monthly bandwidth allowance... and frankly, it's worth $20 a month to me to not have to do that. And if I had an even faster connection, I'd have to be even more careful not to run up a bill since I'd be able to download larger files much faster-- I'd rather pay the $40-$70/month for a cable line or DSL on the basic assumption that I'm going to let most of my available bandwidth go to waste-- the same assumption I make when I buy flat rate "unlimited" local service for my home phone (even though there is metered phone service available, which is much cheaper).
Okay. I honestly don't understand how even the most expert computer forensics team can recover data that has been overwritten by ones then by zeros. Isn't this like saying that a cassette tape which held a pirated Metallica song and was then recorded over with white noise and then a clear signal is still possible to recover the Metallica song intact? The real problem, as this judge points out, is that a deleted file usually isn't deleted at all, the pointers to it are just removed from the directory tree, which means that the file just needs to be found on the disk and repointed to for recovery.
I agree, though, that this judge's statement is nice --especially in the case of workstations at work, for which most files sit on fileservers or mail servers that get backed up regularly. No amount of deleting or file shredding hits the backup tapes. And I assume many corporations backup to a permanent backup at least once in a while, with incremental or daily backups in between.
I compile and run KDE2 and Konqueror on a P/133 with a mere 32 megs of RAM, so I find it hard to think of it as bloated. Yeah, it's a little slow, especially when I try to run Apache and an emacs session so I can edit, serve, and view webpages all on my laptop (web development is more fun at the park than in the computer room), but it runs and is amazingly stable-- especially given the beta status of all the object code for the entire K environment.
[Warning: Zealous rant ahead] I have no interest in paying for proprietary software when I could give that same money to the developers of Free software, so how much is the Opera registration price? In fact, I find confounding the constant expectation of Linux users that anything with a GPL-type license should be gotten for $0, while it's perfectly fine to shell out $$ for software that limits freedom just because they are supporting Linux. It's this exact attitude that helps starve people writing Free software, while enriching those who have made it clear that they don't care about your freedom. For instance, I'd love to test Opera on one of my faster Linux machines at home, but it's a PPC-based system, so no luck. If the software were Free, I'd at least be able to try to compile it on that machine. So instead of praising the Opera team, I guess I'll ignore them and get back to figuring out which Free software projects I use the most and making sure I'm assisting them financially.
This one is a little thick, but it's a nice biased look at what ASCAP/BMI are all about. Whether the RIAA or ASCAP/BMI control the online version of this extortion scheme so they can continue to foist bad music on the public is irrelevant.
No, it doesn't go left to right. First of all, the idea that Democrats don't want to interfere with personal choice is hogwash. They are foremost in the battle against guns. They are quite comfortable assailing all manner of free speech (i.e. if you are not PC, please be aware that this is potentially a civil liability and/or a criminal activity). And both of the mentioned issues are not about personal control of one's own body/destiny, they are about interpretations of the right to privacy and at what point it breaks down. And the Reform party are not libertarians, the Libertarians are, and they do not fit neatly on the straight line scale.
Actually, I'd be keen on interacting with a 3D website, provided the 3D effect was done with stereoptic glasses (the ones with a blue lens for one eye and a red lens for the other) and the effect achieved within regular HTML via JPGs/PNGs. This would allow against either a white or a black background, for different elements to appear to be somewhat dimensional, and for emphasis related to depth to be added. Admittedly this would mostly be for the novelty value of the experience, but I've seen a lot of comic books done this way, and photographs can be rendered this way as well (not the newer photos with the refractive surface element, no glasses needed, but if the image is taken with the proper camera this is reall cool, and this may even be possible with the old stereoscopes which work on the same principle as those ViewMaster clicky goggle things).
Frankly, I'm tired of the false dichotomies. There is no decision to be either Socialist or Capitalist. Left wing versus Right wing. The idea that politics is a line disturbs me. Life is not a series of EOR comparisons (on/off switches). DNA is not a binary number system.
To counter the previous post and all such false dichotomies, I'll drone on... You can certainly consider social liberty important, while at the same time maintaining a "conservative" (i.e. non-interfering) stance on finances, this is a bias against government interference in the private finances and activities of citizens (Libertarian view), which is distinct from the idea that government should interfere constantly on "moral" issues, but somehow manage to fund itself without excess financial interference with citizens (Republican view), which is distinct from the idea that government should freely interfere with private finances and personal issues of morality on a regular basis (Democratic view), which is distinct from the idea that government should feel free to tax citizens, but use the money to empower citizens so that they'll be able to enjoy their social liberty (Green view). Seen this way, politics is difficult to measure from left to right, and at best can be seen as a two dimensional matrix. And I've way oversimplified it and again created a false dichotomy by trying to make the two subjects (finance and morality) distinct and polar in and of them themselves.
As long as the main purpose of this article was to bring about yet another flame war on the topic of intellectual property, I may as well jump in...
Open source, Schmopen Source. The mere concept is a buzzword invented for the sole purpose of sounding buzzwordy and preventing techies from having to use words like "Free" in their discussions with management, since "Free" sounds too much like "freeware", which we all know is lame "shareware", which is a euphemism for "quick hack for one job", which means that all this "Free Software" is basically no good for "Real Computing", especially since you get what you pay for and we didn't pay a damn thing for "Free Software". That said, Free Software is the best software. Not because of peer review, not because I'm a C hacker and can fix bugs with my superpowers. But because it is Free. That's a good patriotic American thing, Freedom is, and I'm all for it.
There are already plenty of Open Source type licenses. I can't imagine that we really need more. Finally, you can't open source license a piece of hardware. You either sell it, lease it, or give it away. Cuecat looks like the latter to me. You can either patent it or not patent it. Cuecat looks like the latter to me. No one has even suggested that there be replica GNU:Cats and thus compete with DC in the hardware arena, which would be a lot more of something to complain about on DC's part.
Combine this idea with the previous post where it is suggested that anyone who is willing to sponsor and host a TLD should be able to, then you've got a really cool system going, imho. Of course, then you need a TLD registrar to keep all the zone lookups in order, right?
By the way, I love this com.* org.* type construction a lot, for the simple fact that you can begin to build URL completion around them. Looking for a company, but aren't totally sure how to spell the name, or worried that it might be hyphenated or whatever. Typing: com.business*name or com.bus*name, gets a list of matches, until you've found your site. This doesn't work so well when the matching starts at the most specific part of the address and is mostly useful for filling in the last four digits/characters.
Slashdot Mirror
You never can tell. I have a sewing machine. Of course, it's a completely analog type that wouldn't work with this. However, I've been thinking the I need to write a Linux program to convert GIF files into cross-stitch patterns.
And along those lines, especially in the area of cross-stitch patterns (which for those that don't know usually consist of a grid filled with symbols to denote colors), there are widespread piracy/IP issues causing havoc in the crafts industry. The pattern makers are screaming because the advances in the internet, home scanning, etc have made it much easier to share pirated patterns which were formerly limited to xeroxing from a friend's book (and obviously lost quality after the first generation).
Actually, that's not the problem. The problem is that probably none of the beta testers would have bothered to leave this particular service enabled since there wouldn't BE any updates to check for prior to release. Sure it's an oversight, but it's not like it reformats your hard drive or allows doubleclick.net to view your persiankitty.com cookies or opens your box to a root exploit.
i can barely imagine anything i want my systems doing less than automatically looking for new software and/or installing updates without my fully conscious awareness of same and active involvement. do people actually find value in this type of service?
You've never actually had a job at a company like those described in Dilbert, have you? You've never actually read Scott Adams, except for the occasional laugh at a comic strip, have you? One must realize that Dilbert is humorous because it is an exaggeration, but it is not a pure invention. Most of the story ideas come from people who work for those large companies, or from Adams' own time as a telco employee. In fact, if you go to the Dilbert website, there is a stock index page where one index is built on the prices of the stocks of companies from which Mr. Adams says he has gotten the most ideas. Incompetence is mostly irrelevant because life is not that fragile when viewed en masse (greenhouse effect and associated theories notwithstanding). Getting up in the morning, eating, getting dressed (and I would have to argue that some are barely able to do this), moving around the planet, working in jobs that rarely require the same brainpower that it took to get past fourth grade, reproducing... these do not require an incredible amount of competence. In fact, all it takes is a few smart people to set up systems, plans, policies, and organizations, and you've got something running which will largely perpetuate itself as long as no one actually stops to question it too much, or try to change it drastically. This is not to suggest that everyone, especially bosses are morons or incompetent. But in any group, most of the people are downright average.
As I read the comments about what a crappy distro Red Hat is, and the 7.0 "fiasco", and how commercial Red Hat is compared to other distros, and brand name this-and-that, it becomes obvious that we're overlooking the obvious reason that IBM is working with Red Hat on this. Namely, that someone at IBM at some point decided that they were getting the best deal from Red Hat in terms of the combination of price and support. This decision is probably fairly unrelated to issues surrounding consumer-grade distributions for the x86 processor. Probably IBM could care less which brand of Linux they choose, since their decision does more for that brand than choosing a particular brand will help IBM sell this. Finally, Red Hat employs Alan Cox, who is a major figure in kernel development, which is the prime piece of any Linux distro that IBM is going to need (that and a compiler).
When abusing the +1 posting bonus, it should be required to attach some sort of label (like with moderation) to one's own post. That way the above poster can clearly label his/her post as "Troll" so that the rest of us won't waste our energy countering the obviously inflammatory and ignorant statements.
Those pages base a supposed lack of obligation to pay Federal Income Tax on a very bizarre redefinition of what it means to be a United States citizen. What a load. This might work in Waco, but it probably won't fly in most of the U.S.
One might even be willing to go to that illegal extreme, though, if only for the pleasure of spell-checking the comments and correcting the grammar.
Well, here's a quote from him, which you can find by following the above link, and following the Issues button...
Giant corporations have hijacked our democracy, have no allegiance to our country or communities, and are increasingly controlling our government, media, childhood...What other society tolerates electronic child molesting the way these corporations are targeting 4-year-olds [on TV]? They know when parents are away working. Then they market their products, undermining parental authority...junk food...violence as a solution to life's problems. People say it's up to the parents. Yeah, but who designed an economy where it takes two, three breadwinners to make a middle-class family living? These top CEOs are making 415 times the entry wage in their own company. You know what it was in 1940? 12. 1980? 40. Now, 415.
You know, Jon Katz could maybe take a hint and stop using digerati wannabe books as a starting place for social discussion and simply head to the Nader site for some launch points. After all, Nader is a Linux user!
[Looking forward to 2004, when Slashdot hosts streaming debates in the next presidential election, complete with a Questions bot and a discussion forum]
Don't real geeks download source and compile everything themselves? I mean, it's a hotrod OS, so why would I go buy the Chrysler wannabe muscle car when I can build my own from a classic frame, body, and engine block, fitting the other parts myself? And RPM/apt-get? What a wuss way to get "packages"! You people make me sick! Is tar broken? Has years of reinstalling Micros~1 binaries softened your brains?
Okay. I still don't follow what Sig11 actually proved, by posting things that people will like he proved that people will moderate them up? Isn't that a bit like proving the assumption? Where is the conclusion, I mean, thanks for the evidence to support the obvious: people will say they like things that they like. If Sig11's point is different than that, please let me know. Otherwise the whole "engineering" thing is a lot of noise.
Furthermore, and far more importantly, I think the Slashdot Cruiser is an awesome machine! I love those PT Cruisers. They are great economy cars, semi-stylish with lots of interior action. So leave the marketroids alone! The only mistake they made was not understanding how doing something pop-culturish like the Slashdot Cruiser would just upset the geeks.
I went to a big state school. This describes the experience of the general knowledge requirements classes that were taught in huge auditoriums, yes. In my major, and in other advanced classes I took, I doubt that anyone would be bothering to sell notes, or that there would be anyone who wanted to buy them. For those cases, I've assumed this debate is irrelevant, since you'd be working more closely with classmates and the professors anyway, and notes would add little to no value, since you missed participating in the class itself, which would hopefully be far more enriching than a simple reading of someone else's subjective notes on that experience.
Have you ever been in college? My experience is that the professor/TA has pretty clear notes, and that most lectures are merely them copying their notes onto an overhead or chalkboard, all the students copy that as closely as possible into notebooks, and that's it. Maybe a question/asnwer session, a little verbal jousting about exactly what's going to be on the exam. On the other hand, this is just the continued erosion of any rights one has a student, since no one seems to question this, even in college. We're already sliding down the slope at a very high rate of speed, so just consider this proper preparation for today's students for today's employment world with it's numerous NDAs, non-competes, and employee surveillance.
Thanks for the insights. Sounds like a painful procedure and hardly worth it for most cases that don't involve national security.
Americans are more than able and willing to understand metered service, we have it for everything from electricity to water to cell phones. In fact there are lots of ISPs that offer a variety of plans based on peak time usage (which affects the cost of a modem pool) which consumers can use to reduce the cost of having an internet connection. Finally, by saying the usage is "unlimited" this really twists the sense of the word. I do not have "unlimited" bandwidth if I'm connecting 24-7 through a 56k. I have 24*7*56k total available to me in any week (the formula is off, but you get the idea). It is up to me as a consumer to maximize my bandwidth usage so that I take advantage of that (unlikely that I'm going to saturate my modem line like that, no matter how hard I try). If I want more connectivity than that (per month total) or want to achieve higher transfer rates on a more discrete time basis I have to pay more for something like cable, DSL, T1, or some other better service. So really, usage is already metered. I'd say the biggest reason not to try to whittle down the $20/mth for the average 56k dialup is that I'd have to start religiously avoiding web pages with a lot of graphics, and things like that in order to end up going over my total monthly bandwidth allowance... and frankly, it's worth $20 a month to me to not have to do that. And if I had an even faster connection, I'd have to be even more careful not to run up a bill since I'd be able to download larger files much faster-- I'd rather pay the $40-$70/month for a cable line or DSL on the basic assumption that I'm going to let most of my available bandwidth go to waste-- the same assumption I make when I buy flat rate "unlimited" local service for my home phone (even though there is metered phone service available, which is much cheaper).
Okay. I honestly don't understand how even the most expert computer forensics team can recover data that has been overwritten by ones then by zeros. Isn't this like saying that a cassette tape which held a pirated Metallica song and was then recorded over with white noise and then a clear signal is still possible to recover the Metallica song intact? The real problem, as this judge points out, is that a deleted file usually isn't deleted at all, the pointers to it are just removed from the directory tree, which means that the file just needs to be found on the disk and repointed to for recovery.
I agree, though, that this judge's statement is nice --especially in the case of workstations at work, for which most files sit on fileservers or mail servers that get backed up regularly. No amount of deleting or file shredding hits the backup tapes. And I assume many corporations backup to a permanent backup at least once in a while, with incremental or daily backups in between.
I compile and run KDE2 and Konqueror on a P/133 with a mere 32 megs of RAM, so I find it hard to think of it as bloated. Yeah, it's a little slow, especially when I try to run Apache and an emacs session so I can edit, serve, and view webpages all on my laptop (web development is more fun at the park than in the computer room), but it runs and is amazingly stable-- especially given the beta status of all the object code for the entire K environment.
[Warning: Zealous rant ahead] I have no interest in paying for proprietary software when I could give that same money to the developers of Free software, so how much is the Opera registration price? In fact, I find confounding the constant expectation of Linux users that anything with a GPL-type license should be gotten for $0, while it's perfectly fine to shell out $$ for software that limits freedom just because they are supporting Linux. It's this exact attitude that helps starve people writing Free software, while enriching those who have made it clear that they don't care about your freedom. For instance, I'd love to test Opera on one of my faster Linux machines at home, but it's a PPC-based system, so no luck. If the software were Free, I'd at least be able to try to compile it on that machine. So instead of praising the Opera team, I guess I'll ignore them and get back to figuring out which Free software projects I use the most and making sure I'm assisting them financially.
This one is a little thick, but it's a nice biased look at what ASCAP/BMI are all about. Whether the RIAA or ASCAP/BMI control the online version of this extortion scheme so they can continue to foist bad music on the public is irrelevant.
No, it doesn't go left to right. First of all, the idea that Democrats don't want to interfere with personal choice is hogwash. They are foremost in the battle against guns. They are quite comfortable assailing all manner of free speech (i.e. if you are not PC, please be aware that this is potentially a civil liability and/or a criminal activity). And both of the mentioned issues are not about personal control of one's own body/destiny, they are about interpretations of the right to privacy and at what point it breaks down. And the Reform party are not libertarians, the Libertarians are, and they do not fit neatly on the straight line scale.
Actually, I'd be keen on interacting with a 3D website, provided the 3D effect was done with stereoptic glasses (the ones with a blue lens for one eye and a red lens for the other) and the effect achieved within regular HTML via JPGs/PNGs. This would allow against either a white or a black background, for different elements to appear to be somewhat dimensional, and for emphasis related to depth to be added. Admittedly this would mostly be for the novelty value of the experience, but I've seen a lot of comic books done this way, and photographs can be rendered this way as well (not the newer photos with the refractive surface element, no glasses needed, but if the image is taken with the proper camera this is reall cool, and this may even be possible with the old stereoscopes which work on the same principle as those ViewMaster clicky goggle things).
I think my point was clear and concise-- but probably evidence that I need to cut down on the caffeine and lighten up once in a while.
Frankly, I'm tired of the false dichotomies. There is no decision to be either Socialist or Capitalist. Left wing versus Right wing. The idea that politics is a line disturbs me. Life is not a series of EOR comparisons (on/off switches). DNA is not a binary number system.
To counter the previous post and all such false dichotomies, I'll drone on... You can certainly consider social liberty important, while at the same time maintaining a "conservative" (i.e. non-interfering) stance on finances, this is a bias against government interference in the private finances and activities of citizens (Libertarian view), which is distinct from the idea that government should interfere constantly on "moral" issues, but somehow manage to fund itself without excess financial interference with citizens (Republican view), which is distinct from the idea that government should freely interfere with private finances and personal issues of morality on a regular basis (Democratic view), which is distinct from the idea that government should feel free to tax citizens, but use the money to empower citizens so that they'll be able to enjoy their social liberty (Green view). Seen this way, politics is difficult to measure from left to right, and at best can be seen as a two dimensional matrix. And I've way oversimplified it and again created a false dichotomy by trying to make the two subjects (finance and morality) distinct and polar in and of them themselves.
This would be a lot funnier if Red Hat weren't at it's all time lowest price right now.
As long as the main purpose of this article was to bring about yet another flame war on the topic of intellectual property, I may as well jump in...
Open source, Schmopen Source. The mere concept is a buzzword invented for the sole purpose of sounding buzzwordy and preventing techies from having to use words like "Free" in their discussions with management, since "Free" sounds too much like "freeware", which we all know is lame "shareware", which is a euphemism for "quick hack for one job", which means that all this "Free Software" is basically no good for "Real Computing", especially since you get what you pay for and we didn't pay a damn thing for "Free Software". That said, Free Software is the best software. Not because of peer review, not because I'm a C hacker and can fix bugs with my superpowers. But because it is Free. That's a good patriotic American thing, Freedom is, and I'm all for it.
There are already plenty of Open Source type licenses. I can't imagine that we really need more. Finally, you can't open source license a piece of hardware. You either sell it, lease it, or give it away. Cuecat looks like the latter to me. You can either patent it or not patent it. Cuecat looks like the latter to me. No one has even suggested that there be replica GNU:Cats and thus compete with DC in the hardware arena, which would be a lot more of something to complain about on DC's part.
Combine this idea with the previous post where it is suggested that anyone who is willing to sponsor and host a TLD should be able to, then you've got a really cool system going, imho. Of course, then you need a TLD registrar to keep all the zone lookups in order, right?
By the way, I love this com.* org.* type construction a lot, for the simple fact that you can begin to build URL completion around them. Looking for a company, but aren't totally sure how to spell the name, or worried that it might be hyphenated or whatever. Typing: com.business*name or com.bus*name, gets a list of matches, until you've found your site. This doesn't work so well when the matching starts at the most specific part of the address and is mostly useful for filling in the last four digits/characters.