> Another advantage is that no teacher could ever ask; What was the authors motivation in writing this particular poem?
Yeah, but I bet I could have written an essay that answered it!
Everything I know about bullshitting I learned in English class. I once got an A on a pop quiz essay about a poem I hadn't even read; I just extrapolated from the title.
If they taught more literature classes in business school then those MBAs would be a lot better at explaining their scandals away, and maybe not get carted of to jail for their crooked dealing. To say nothing of politicians; those guys should be English majors instead of lawyers.
> Of what I heard, Gutenberg made the movable type so he could make books cheaper. But he also made the "Publishers' Guild" and wreaked what he could have made known to the public. He put back knowledge for 100 years by allowing of such a guild that muchg power.
Folklore also holds that he perfected his technology in order to be able to undercut the competition's prices for counterfiet "indulgences".
(And you think today's IP is out of control... imagine being a middle-man able to levy a fee on sinning!)
> If a lot of people file complaints, perhaps that will cause the SEC, or the government in general, to take some serious notice of this serious problem.
Think carefully before you file, because a big pile of perceived frivolous complaints isn't likely to help.
However, my gut feel is that this is worth having the SEC look in to. All those stock specials for the board members a few weeks before the FUD started really raise the suspicion of some insider arrangements on a stock scam.
It would be nice if the FTC would look in to the FUD and extortion, too.
1. Volunteers enable wireless access at ballpark 2. They put out a news released titled, "PGE Park gets free Wi-Fi thanks to Personal Telco and Moonlight Staffing" 3. PGE Park management (understandably) is concerned that the news release implies their participation in this effort, and this might offend a major park sponsor, Comcast. 4. Comcast replies that they don't care. Life goes on.
> I'm reminded of a scene in one of Donald Westlakes weirder caper novels. Two guys are travelling through a really flat section of Oklahoma. One is a stone killer with no sense of humor or irony. They reach a place where the land is so flat and featureless, you can't even see the horizon. The killer turns to the other guy and says, "You know, before the white man came, there was absolutely nothing here!"
One of my friends was hitch-hiking across Kansas/Oklahoma when a really weird guy picked him up. They drove for miles and miles without the guy saying anything or even looking at him. Finally he said in a low, slow voice, with his eyes fixed steadily on the road ahead -
> The method is actually fairly accurate - the distribution of galaxies and their density is sufficiently uniform to provide a number that shouldn't be off by more than 7-8%.
And 7-8% of 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is only 4,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 - 5,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 star systems, so we shouldn't lose too many galactic civilizations in the noise!
I wonder whether the Galactic Republicans and Galactic Democrats are debating the legality of using statistical modelling for the next gazillintinniel census report.
> Someone (Mad Dog?) said that Linux and OSS are international treasures that should be protected, and government intervention might be just what we need. Obviously US government would never intervene (Bush & all)
> We all recognize that SCO is blowing hot air. Why not just ignore it? You get a nastygram from them, throw it out.
Surely it will be a valuable collectors' item in a couple of years?
> There's no reason to prevent SCO from talking if no one is listening in the first place.
Problem is, they're not spouting this nonsense for the benefit of well informed geeks. They're either targeting clueless PHBs (kamakazi attack on Linux hypothesis) or else clueless suckers wanting to make a quick buck on the stock market (finance golden parachutes hypothesis), and those people are going to listen whether we do or not. Far better that we should listen carefully and then point out the bullshit very publicly.
> > Under a provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by Congress to combat music piracy, music companies may issue the subpoenas without a judge's approval.
> Far out. Anyone know exactly what the provision entails?
Apparently it entails raids on universities and other ISPs to get the names of people involved in file swapping.
Notice that prior copyright law already made things like file swapping illegal, but prosecuting the little guy was not a profitable exercise for big copyright holders... all that bother with obtaining the evidence legally, a trial, and a judgement in proportion to the economic value of the crime, feh!
The DMCA exists so that those companies can practice direct interdiction rather than having the government do things by due process, and also so that those interdictions won't cost more than the companies think they're worth.
In a country where money matters above all else, when due process is deemed too expensive you're bound to see it eroded.
Too bad people can't vote for candidates who promise to preserve our traditional rights and freedoms rather than for those who promise to pump up our bank balances. Corporate greed is just an indirect manifestation of individual greed, and we'll never rein in the lobbyists until we learn to rein in ourselves.
In a nation increasingly ruled by lobbyists, judges are just unnecessary middle-men for this kind of thing, and can be expected to be downsized out of the loop.
> > certainly isn't going to raise share prices enough
> Shares of the SCO Group surged 11% on Monday...
Yes, but that's my point. What drove the prices up wasn't the specifics of the actual claim filed against IBM, but rather the over-hyped PR ploy of filing a small and apparently irrelevant copyright on some code.
McBride isn't playing the IT community very well (unless of course his goal is to see how many people he can piss off), but he's playing some group of stock-market jackals very well indeed. Expect more of the same until the SCO board decides to cash out.
> SCO may now have filed for UNIX copyrights and made various allegations about code-copying, but the actual complaint against IBM still seems to be focused around allegations UNIX-based enterprise technologies (such as RCU, JFS and SMP) being improperly added to Linux.
Yeah, but the actual complaint doesn't have any FUD value, and certainly isn't going to raise share prices enough to finance a set of golden parachutes, so you can expect to keep hear them harping on all that other stuff.
> Of course they'd prefer licensing. They were NOT granted a copyright on SysV Unix, but on a 20-page printout of some modifications to Sys5 verseion 4.1.
The funny thing is that the ploy (I have trouble thinking of it as anything else) was sufficient to drive their share price up by 20%. We should keep that fact in mind next time we hear someone claim that share prices tell us anything useful.
Re: Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
> Yes, X has remote display. That's a really useful and flexible feature in some situations, no doubt about it. And from a technical point of view, it's extremely elegant. In reality, though, to a great many linux users, it's a neat trick that you don't necessairly NEED.
Sure, but what about the rest of us?
> From a GUI perspective, if you use all KDE apps, for instance, things have a very nice consistent feel to it. Same with gnome. When you start mixing things, plus mixing in old X apps, you just detract from an overall experience..
Which has jack-all to do with whether the desired consistent toolkit is based on X or not...
> This sort of thing has been around for decades. I remember as far back as the early 1970s, hobbyist magazines' "Buyer's Guide" issues would have deliberately bogus entries to ensure that their competitors didn't steal the data wholesale for their own buyer's guides.
I actually did it on computers a decade ago, and I doubt that I was a groundbreaker even then.
Already by then VMS provided ACLs and a very sophisticated security monitor that you could program plugins for ("plugin" for lack of a better term), so I set up a plugin that would mail me an e-message upon a certain trigger, and then put the trigger in the ACLs for some dummy files where some of our irresponsible support staff wasn't supposed to be playing around.
Slashdot Mirror
> Another advantage is that no teacher could ever ask; What was the authors motivation in writing this particular poem?
Yeah, but I bet I could have written an essay that answered it!
Everything I know about bullshitting I learned in English class. I once got an A on a pop quiz essay about a poem I hadn't even read; I just extrapolated from the title.
If they taught more literature classes in business school then those MBAs would be a lot better at explaining their scandals away, and maybe not get carted of to jail for their crooked dealing. To say nothing of politicians; those guys should be English majors instead of lawyers.
> So much for a free press and research materials.. This is such a load of crap. The largest images publicly available are 835x600.
How big is the fold-out?
> Of what I heard, Gutenberg made the movable type so he could make books cheaper. But he also made the "Publishers' Guild" and wreaked what he could have made known to the public. He put back knowledge for 100 years by allowing of such a guild that muchg power.
Folklore also holds that he perfected his technology in order to be able to undercut the competition's prices for counterfiet "indulgences".
(And you think today's IP is out of control... imagine being a middle-man able to levy a fee on sinning!)
> Actually its more like the scene in Jurassic park right before the Lawyer gets eaten by the t-rex.
Except in this movie the lawyer is about to eat the T. rex.
> If a lot of people file complaints, perhaps that will cause the SEC, or the government in general, to take some serious notice of this serious problem.
Think carefully before you file, because a big pile of perceived frivolous complaints isn't likely to help.
However, my gut feel is that this is worth having the SEC look in to. All those stock specials for the board members a few weeks before the FUD started really raise the suspicion of some insider arrangements on a stock scam.
It would be nice if the FTC would look in to the FUD and extortion, too.
1. Volunteers enable wireless access at ballpark
2. They put out a news released titled, "PGE Park gets free Wi-Fi thanks to Personal Telco and Moonlight Staffing"
3. PGE Park management (understandably) is concerned that the news release implies their participation in this effort, and this might offend a major park sponsor, Comcast.
4. Comcast replies that they don't care. Life goes on.
5. Profit!
to which my friend calmly replied -> I'm reminded of a scene in one of Donald Westlakes weirder caper novels. Two guys are travelling through a really flat section of Oklahoma. One is a stone killer with no sense of humor or irony. They reach a place where the land is so flat and featureless, you can't even see the horizon. The killer turns to the other guy and says, "You know, before the white man came, there was absolutely nothing here!"
One of my friends was hitch-hiking across Kansas/Oklahoma when a really weird guy picked him up. They drove for miles and miles without the guy saying anything or even looking at him. Finally he said in a low, slow voice, with his eyes fixed steadily on the road ahead -
> The method is actually fairly accurate - the distribution of galaxies and their density is sufficiently uniform to provide a number that shouldn't be off by more than 7-8%.
And 7-8% of 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is only 4,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 - 5,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 star systems, so we shouldn't lose too many galactic civilizations in the noise!
I wonder whether the Galactic Republicans and Galactic Democrats are debating the legality of using statistical modelling for the next gazillintinniel census report.
> Someone (Mad Dog?) said that Linux and OSS are international treasures that should be protected, and government intervention might be just what we need. Obviously US government would never intervene (Bush & all)
They might intervene to kill it off...
> France: Do the French use computers?
Yes, they just call them something else.
> I hope that they put the boots to SCO. Whatever their contributions to Linux as Caldera
These aren't even the same people. These are ambulance chasers who bought the body in hopes of suing on its behalf.
> We all recognize that SCO is blowing hot air. Why not just ignore it? You get a nastygram from them, throw it out.
Surely it will be a valuable collectors' item in a couple of years?
> There's no reason to prevent SCO from talking if no one is listening in the first place.
Problem is, they're not spouting this nonsense for the benefit of well informed geeks. They're either targeting clueless PHBs (kamakazi attack on Linux hypothesis) or else clueless suckers wanting to make a quick buck on the stock market (finance golden parachutes hypothesis), and those people are going to listen whether we do or not. Far better that we should listen carefully and then point out the bullshit very publicly.
> > Under a provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by Congress to combat music piracy, music companies may issue the subpoenas without a judge's approval.
> Far out. Anyone know exactly what the provision entails?
Apparently it entails raids on universities and other ISPs to get the names of people involved in file swapping.
Notice that prior copyright law already made things like file swapping illegal, but prosecuting the little guy was not a profitable exercise for big copyright holders... all that bother with obtaining the evidence legally, a trial, and a judgement in proportion to the economic value of the crime, feh!
The DMCA exists so that those companies can practice direct interdiction rather than having the government do things by due process, and also so that those interdictions won't cost more than the companies think they're worth.
In a country where money matters above all else, when due process is deemed too expensive you're bound to see it eroded.
Too bad people can't vote for candidates who promise to preserve our traditional rights and freedoms rather than for those who promise to pump up our bank balances. Corporate greed is just an indirect manifestation of individual greed, and we'll never rein in the lobbyists until we learn to rein in ourselves.
> Imagine the turmoil to a school administrator, knowing their students' life savings are about to get sucked up by the RIAA for sharing a few songs.
Imagine the turmoil at the school's Accounts Receivable office!
> Private companies can issue subpoenas!!
In a nation increasingly ruled by lobbyists, judges are just unnecessary middle-men for this kind of thing, and can be expected to be downsized out of the loop.
> So where do you think the RIAA lawyers came from? Eastern Europe perhaps?
Not unless Hell has been relocated to Eastern Europe.
> Democracy: two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for lunch
> Liberty: a well armed sheep expressing his rights.
Anarchy: a planet full of well-armed sheep who all claim to be expressing their 'rights'.
> > certainly isn't going to raise share prices enough
> Shares of the SCO Group surged 11% on Monday...
Yes, but that's my point. What drove the prices up wasn't the specifics of the actual claim filed against IBM, but rather the over-hyped PR ploy of filing a small and apparently irrelevant copyright on some code.
McBride isn't playing the IT community very well (unless of course his goal is to see how many people he can piss off), but he's playing some group of stock-market jackals very well indeed. Expect more of the same until the SCO board decides to cash out.
> SCO may now have filed for UNIX copyrights and made various allegations about code-copying, but the actual complaint against IBM still seems to be focused around allegations UNIX-based enterprise technologies (such as RCU, JFS and SMP) being improperly added to Linux.
Yeah, but the actual complaint doesn't have any FUD value, and certainly isn't going to raise share prices enough to finance a set of golden parachutes, so you can expect to keep hear them harping on all that other stuff.
> Of course they'd prefer licensing. They were NOT granted a copyright on SysV Unix, but on a 20-page printout of some modifications to Sys5 verseion 4.1.
The funny thing is that the ploy (I have trouble thinking of it as anything else) was sufficient to drive their share price up by 20%. We should keep that fact in mind next time we hear someone claim that share prices tell us anything useful.
> Yes, X has remote display. That's a really useful and flexible feature in some situations, no doubt about it. And from a technical point of view, it's extremely elegant. In reality, though, to a great many linux users, it's a neat trick that you don't necessairly NEED.
Sure, but what about the rest of us?
> From a GUI perspective, if you use all KDE apps, for instance, things have a very nice consistent feel to it. Same with gnome. When you start mixing things, plus mixing in old X apps, you just detract from an overall experience..
Which has jack-all to do with whether the desired consistent toolkit is based on X or not...
> This sort of thing has been around for decades. I remember as far back as the early 1970s, hobbyist magazines' "Buyer's Guide" issues would have deliberately bogus entries to ensure that their competitors didn't steal the data wholesale for their own buyer's guides.
I actually did it on computers a decade ago, and I doubt that I was a groundbreaker even then.
Already by then VMS provided ACLs and a very sophisticated security monitor that you could program plugins for ("plugin" for lack of a better term), so I set up a plugin that would mail me an e-message upon a certain trigger, and then put the trigger in the ACLs for some dummy files where some of our irresponsible support staff wasn't supposed to be playing around.
> Except that their prohibitive size would mean you'd probably have to hire a poopsmith just to clean up after the fucker!
Smith? Do you dispose of it by turning it into 44mm3r3d 5417 or something?
> No Borg icon? No wise cracks? What gives?
The cracks are in the software; don't know about the other stuff.
> Maybee theyre building a huge honeypot....
When you say 'they', are you referring to the DHC, or to MSFT?