Anyone here notice yet that the popular opinion on this discussion is that who does the damned EU think they are to regulate how Nintendo can sell their product; whereas on SuSe Linux will run Microsoft Office, it's all about how MS is an evil monopoly that needs to be regulated?
First, some information. The decision wasn't made based on how Nintendo wants to set prices. All you free-traders are right - they can do whatever they want. However, the laws they admitted to breaking concerned their price-fixing, not their pricing, ie their strong-arm tactics in preventing distributors from selling their products in countries where Nintendo wanted to price them higher. This is exactly not free-trade.
A couple of thoughts:
(1) There are completely different people making the arguments. None of the free-traders are hanging out on the SuSe Linux discussion, but they're coming out in numbers here.
(2) The/. crowd loves busting on Evil Devil-Worshipping MS but will defend to the death their Beloved Happy Shiny NES, even though the actual differences in behavior might be quite slim.
(3) ?
That's what I love about slashdot. The diversity of the uninformed opinions... =)
That's the whole point! They were fined for attempting to restrict trade between EU states, to prevent people and retailers from "ordering it from somewhere else".
However, if they break the backwards compatibility, they should (be forced to) maintain and sell the old office and keep patching those security holes in the previous version. After all, they are declared a monopoly by US judges, and forcing users to upgrade their entire system in order to install Office software would be outrageous.
Are you in America? It's very unlikely in this country that any court can/should/would force a company to continue supporting a product it doesn't want to. There are exceptions where public safety is concerned. If someone found a bug that Office documents could cause a computer to catch fire, and not just a little one but a *fireball*, then, yes, a court could force them to do a recall and upgrade (although, for PR's sake, they'd probably do it voluntarily). But because you want to support new file formats? Fuhgettaboutit.
When you're buying Office, you're expecting to be able to use that software as long as you can find computers that can run it. I know, MS wants to change the licensing model. They're allowed to, you know. If it makes money, then they were right. If it costs them a lot of business, which it probably will, then they were wrong.
Bottom line: not spending valuable time supporting products that most people don't own anymore and won't make them much money, freeing up developers to work on new products that can actually make money is better business (and evolutionary) sense than the other way around. So companies do that. If they didn't, they would die.
I'm really surprised to hear that one guy likes the AIM system better.. I'm an old time ICQ user (funny how many people on this discussion mention low UINs (I'm 8922xx btw =) ), so maybe i'm biased, but i was so pissed that my nicknames were already registered. 8922xx in my book isn't any harder to remember than randomidiot420, and i'd be more confident if my nickname didn't match up with the one i told the other person when i gave them my UIN that they wouldn't message a total stranger (randomidiot1010220) thinking it was me.
Jeezus. Haven't used ICQ since 98 and I can still remember my UIN. What's my AIM again?
I used to think you just saw an opening to score a few bucks on a referral off of the slashdot community, but I just realized that's the entire reasonyoupost. And those are just the times you've done it in the last week. Oh and here's another.
I notice you turn off your signature when your entire post is a referral scam.
I couldn't imagine a sleazier way to make a few bucks. Disclose the fact that your tags have referrer links. It wouldn't hurt your "sales" and it would certainly help your karma. And I don't mean your slashdot karma...
I think you're advocating for Government to license under BSD, which makes sense to me. Your last sentence made it a little unclear.
I think it makes sense for the Feds to use a BSD license for original software creations, as one of their goals is to allow businesses to profit from the research. This is so much better than selling the research to one corporation because it allows the public-at-large the same rights to their software. If one of the citizenry runs with the project, and turns it into something new, and GPLs it, all the better. Then the corps can decide whether they want to use the better GPLd version or the worse one under the BSD.
What doesn't make sense? This has been discussed to death the last couple of days. The BSDL is a better fit, given the Feds' stated interests in preserving business and public exploitations of funded research.
What would be nice is to see more government projects start from a GPL software base, like the still-very-much-alive-and-well SELinux project. I wish this had more support from the community, as right now it's only the wizards that are touching it. If more people got sucked into it, they probably would, in typical Linux fashion, start making it more accessible to the power user with less than several days to devote to moving over his existing setup to an SELinux box. The curve right now is pretty steep.
I got side-tracked. My point was that if more government projects started from a GPL base, then all the work they did on top of it would automatically be available to us, and Mr. Smith's parent corporation wouldn't be involved at that point.
BSDL for new work, GPL for modifying existing projects. The public benefits most.
Red Hat general counsel Mark Webbink speculated that some members of Congress may have signed the anti-GPL note without fully realizing what they were doing. "I think they were probably hastened into something that most of them would now recognize as not being that well advised," he said.
How often do we hear this explanation for some dumb move by politicians? Is it fair to expect them to even read letters or legislation before endorsing them? How many have claimed surprise at what they found out was in the DMCA, or the Patriot Act? Will they do it now with Smith's letter? I don't think I'm as forgiving as Mr. Webbink...
In other words, as we all know, Smith is bought and paid for and owned by MS
For $22,900? They got him cheap. Talk about a depressed economy - even the government boys are feeling the pinch. ; )
Christ at those rates I could afford my own Congressman... I hear it's the best investment you can make. Maybe I can send him back to Washington pushing the schlach agenda. Wow, my own pet Congressman... I'd play with him and feed him everyday... =p
Even if this specific guy is not an MS shill, how many people who defend MS here are? Keep up your cynicism, review the record, they haven't changed.
I couldn't agree more. I hate when I postjokes at Microsoft's expense, and they get modded down by MS zealots. As far as being anybody's shill, I stand by my trackrecord. My real issue is intelligence and open-mindedness on Slashdot. The strength of the community increases when we don't sound like a bunch of reactionary zealots, ourselves.
Actually, what I think would be a better plot if I were 'Astroturfing' (?), would be to post an accusatory comment calling into question my objectivity, and allowing me to post comments testifying to my credibility, thereby heading off others' potential criticism. Kinda like the whole Republicans and Democrats being owned by the same guy. Or Coke and Pepsi.
Wrap your head around that... ; )
... And then to establish my credibility even further, I'd tell people my entire plan, in case they suspected as much...
Oh, nothing personal. It just made sense to me, like in a voice conversation, you reply to the person who just spoke, even when you're talking in a group. Sorta. Just following the thread...
I think you misunderstood my intent. I was ridiculing the argument that the butterfly men were Evil, simply because they posed a distraction. I agree that it's nonsensical, but it's going on in other parts of the discussion as we speak. I read several comments to that effect.
Does anyone else feel ridiculous saying "the butterfly men"?
At some point, the worm will be detected, thus the slow infection rate will not be optimal.
I propose that a breakthrough was made in the modularity of worm systems last year, with Code Red and Nimda. The infection mechanism can be separated from the intelligence/communication module and payload. Does anyone know how many machines are still infected by Nimda?? It's staggering. You could have a worm that only spread to machines already infected by Nimda, and virtually guarantee that it would never be detected. You'd 0wN a staggering number of machines, your worm could close off others access to the same cmd.exe sitting in the web root, increasing survival chances for your host (less likely to be taken down), and you could do all the intelligent communication you wanted. Better yet, design a mechanism so that later versions of your worm will replace previous ones, so you can release updates as the design becomes more sophisticated. The possibilities are endless. As much time as you want to tinker with the perfect intelligent worm design, and you don't even have to write the infection module yourself.
I think wormnet design is one of the coolest theoretical exercises in CS... the problem right now is that there's no incentive to write intelligent worms (ie WormNet), because the unintelligent ones are so effective. Nimda was spotted almost immediately. It's still one of the worst. What's that tell you? When authors stop thinking about the individual worm, and start thinking that each worm is just a cell in a collective online entity... well, i'm kind of soured on calling things a paradigm shift, so I won't say.. d'oh!
Ok, I must have missed the story about the IBM San-Fran chalking faisco, but someone posted the relevant links. The real IDG story, and the exclusive coverage of the IDG story, at the Register.
The short story is that IBM got caught spraypainting / chalking Tux and the caption "Peace, Love, and Linux" on the sidewalks of numerous street corners all over the city. They claimed it was "biodegradable", if not "easily water soluble" chalk, and were banking on it disappearing the next time it rained. It didn't. The article doesn't mention whether it eventually did wash off, after several rains (think back to college days - did that chalk only last one rainfall?), or whether they had to break down and have it removed first.
I have a picture of one of the MSN butterflies applied to the 7th Avenue Station sign, but I don't know where to post it. You'd say it was quite tasteful if you saw it. It looks like part of the sign. I hear a lot of arguments about why MS's campaign is evil, whereas IBM's was just and righteous. I'm going to play Devil's Advocate for a minute here, since no one else seems to want to.
I don't want to hear anyone in this country say that the reason MS's campaign is evil is because they create waste. I'm not saying they don't, but is that the reason that you think fast-food, snail-mail solicitations from charitable organizations, and buying soda is evil? Let's be honest about how much waste we all generate, whether or not we're tacking up little butterflies to subway stations...
And the rollerbladers are evil, not because they are generating waste, but because they're a "distraction". A pedestrian might walk into an open manhole because they were too distracted by the butterfly men. Uh huh. MS has pretty deep pockets. Let the frivolous lawsuits begin. If you can squeeze any money out of their lawyers, you've earned it.
What's that leave? Evil because they're advertising for MSN 8, instead of a righteous cause such as Linux, therefore anything they do, regardless of eco-friendliness and distractive potential is Evil? I don't think a rational argument can be made for or against that, so I don't want to debate it.
MS is evil, because IBM did it first. Hate to disappoint, but IBM did not invent the concept of publicity stunt. I have no idea how far back it goes, but in modern times I've got a reference here for 1917 before the original release of the first Tarzan movie. Harry Reichenbach was hired to promote it, so he anonymously let loose an oranguatan dressed in a tuxedo inside a fancy hotel filled with New York elite. The newspapers had a field day, and a few days later, Reichenbach called to let them know that it had been a stunt for Tarzan, so they covered it again, this time letting everyone know it had been for the movie. Tarzan made a killing at the box-office.
As far as I'm concerned, every publicity stunt since then has been Evil. Evil! (whoops, I think I lost my serious edge. Anyway, my source on the Tarzan story is Uncle John's Biggest Ever Bathroom Reader, from the scholarly "Bathroom Reader's Institute", which is an absolute crack-pipe for trivia junkies like myself.)
Killing a life before it ever has a chance to live is wrong. And whether it is illegal or not is irrelevant - it doesn't make it right.
I couldn't agree with you more, which is why I assert that abstinence is the biggest killer of unborn children in America. Abstinence is prescribed by law if she's under age. Help us repeal the Age of Consent laws, and less children will be murdered by abstinence every year... ; )
Why don't I ever hear that argument coming from Jerry Fallwell...
I still believe that people who feel they are mature enough, and responsible enough to engage in sex, need to be mature enough and responsible enough to accept this reduced risk.
Perhaps, but I don't think the decision to have an abortion is one that is taken in the absence of maturity and responsibility. It is a very difficult decision. I don't think anyone gets a giddy little thrill from "beating the system". The decision is made when the mother cannot responsibly care for the baby. If a foolish fourteen year old gets pregnant, what kind of life has she determined for herself and the baby? She may have to drop out of school, tank dreams of college, to care for her baby. She may be thrown out of the house by her parents in her time of need. She may resent the child for ruining her life. What kind of environment might the baby grow up in at that point? If she decides to have an abortion, it may be the most responsible thing she can do at that point. It's not trivial. It can cause lifelong emotional duress. It's a decision that needs to be understood with compassion, not judgement.
No one is pro-abortion. People are pro-choice because they don't want the government, especially one controlled so heavily by the fundamentalist Religious Reich, to be able to dictate one of the most serious decisions a person or couple may ever have to make. It's one of those, "Who are you to tell me how to live my life?" kinds of jobs. But the Right is very prescriptive, the way Christian missionaries have always been. I don't know what makes them tick, but I have a hard time believing it's a sincere committment to saving souls. But that's a different topic.
Every child wanted, every child loved. Massive overpopulation isn't doing anyone any favors, either. And the less outside interference in anyone's life, whether it be from relgious governments or governmental religions, the better.
I would like to thank you for not "going off" I am very much in the minority on this issue when it comes to my social circles, and I appreciate the rational conversation on the matter. I usually only encounter closed minded, almost violent responses to my views.
You and me both, my friend. I've never had this argument with anyone who wasn't in it from a fundamentalist (where the hell did that word come from, anyway?) Christian background. And usually their responses are pretty frothing-at-the-mouth, too. I favor a self-deterministic view of government and religion (I hestitate to say "libertarian"). The idea that people weren't made to be subordinate. It's only the meek or unlucky that get subordinated. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for that whole Christ (if not Christian) ethic of "do unto others", "turn the other cheek", "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", etc. So anyone advocating that I be subordinate to their laws/relgious views/whatever doesn't go over real well with me. They better ask real nice.. =)
Alright, alright, haven't been able to get into an abortion argument since high-school, since I went to such a liberal pinko long-haired hippie freak university... =)
Remember, unless they were forced to have sex, they are a willing host.
Unless they were forced, they are willing to have sex. Not to be pregnant. That's why many couples use contraceptives and the jim hat. If pregnancy ensues despite the use of a condom, I'd say the lovers never agreed to be willing hosts.
Jared Diamond makes some interesting theories in his book, The Third Chimpanzee, about the role of sex in evolution. "Our concealed ovulation [he means, a woman's buttocks don't turn blue when she's ovulating], constant receptivity [women engage in sex in between times of ovulation, not just during], and brief fertile period in each menstrual cycle ensure that most copulations by humans are at the wrong time for conception...Whatever the main biological function of human copulation, it isn't contraception, which is just an accoasional by-product." (p. 77-78)
If it were just about giving us a procreative edge, copulation would take much less time than the 4 minutes on average it takes humans, and we'd only do it during a woman's ovulatory period. Other primates spend 15-30 seconds, others a minute. But all less than humans. And baboons would know who's ovulating as soon as they sit down at the bar. But do you?
So, short explanation? His theory is that sex evolved to be so damn great in order to cement the social relationship between a man and a woman, so that the man would remain to rear the offspring. It takes much more fatherly involvement in the raising of human young than that of other species, and a strong bond between man and woman apparently turned out to be a good way of getting Dad to stick around.
And just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. I really hope that the world pulls it's head out of it's ass and realizes that legal murder is going on everywhere.
I'd hope that the world stops sanctioning legal murder in terms of political assassinations. But if everyone everywhere, as you say, is endorsing abortion as better than the alternative of not-abortion, you have to wonder if maybe somebody's thought of something you haven't...
which is more than the next two biggest, combined.
Notable quote from front page:
"Lobbying and giving money to politicians is the best return on an investment in the entire -- in the entire free world." -- Carl Mayer, committeeman in Princeton, New Jersey (60 Minutes, 5/12/1996)
To be fair, if this guy wasn't pushing MS anti-GPL in DC, he wouldn't be doing a very good job of representing his constituency...
Go to the front page and "Search By Individual Donor" on Microsoft. Sort by size of "donation" (I'm quite certain "political donation" is an oxymoron - political investment might be a better term). It's quite informative.
There's an arena in which Free Software performance will never match commercial...
It seems like a small story from a small news outfit that is quite thin on anything other than Mr. Warby's hearsay. Talk about FUD... but with any news site, no matter how obscure, as soon as it hits the front page of slashdot, it is beyond reproach. That's something we should watch out for, after reading so much yesterday about Alan Sokal's Social Text hoax. In summary, he tricked a popular publication of the literary, postmodern Left into printing a hoax article of his that any amount of editorial review should have uncovered as a hoax, to the discredit of the journal, the editors, and (hopefully) perhaps some of the movement itself.
Let's not be so reactionary that we leave ourselves open to a Sokaling - a doc without any factual basis, that goes unchecked because its conclusions agree with our mindset.
What should also be mentioned is Slashdot's ability to make the news. We're a publication with a large circulation, that doesn't do much fact checking before our editors endorse an article. (I know that we never set out to be a reputable news site, but when google's news is referencing us as the top source on a story... I'd be happy if we just held ourselves to a higher bar.) If the Smallsville Post carries a totally unresearched article that doesn't ever leave the downtown coffee shop area, and LexLutherCorp doesn't even bother returning a comment on it, and suddenly the Daily Planet, without doing any more investigating, just decides to reprint it to its own (much-larger) readership... well, it bites when the article turns out to be crap.
Now that it's been slashBotted, the article will probably get a response from MS PR, something along the lines of, "Don't be silly, of course Microsoft has the highest committment to customer data confidentiality, as part of our TrustWorthy Computing (TM) Initiative. All of the data we use comes from version numbers, and we leave the option for customers to completely disable the Microsoft Windows Update feature. Look at how paranoid and reactionary this bunch of misfits is. Snort. Linux users... " =)
Let's win the spin war Larry Wall style, not MS style.
Jared Diamond made the argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel that all major epidemics (small pox, plague, etc) have arisen from our close association with domesticated animals (mainly pigs, dirty SOBs). The lack of domesticated animals by the New World population was the reason he cites for the one-sidedness of the spread of epidemics to/fro the European invaders.
Which makes sense, I guess, if you figure that evolutionarily we could handle our own microbes and infectious organisms well before we started domesticating other animals ~ 9000 years ago. We couldn't handle the infectious organisms they showed us (so much). And it's been nothing but good times ever since.
Who knows what lies in wait for the future? Without having precisely all the facts, I'm predicting that every recipient of a pig-grown organ will one morning wake up in a mindless trance, stumbling around attacking humans and mumbling "braaaaaaiiinnns" until bludgeoned or shot in the head. There was a George Romero documentary about something similar in the 60s...
I like to refer to them collectively as the Religious Reich. Last time I checked, that domain was still available. =) I always hoped someone would put up an anti-censorship page there...
Some states in that bunch have a history of liberty-mindedness, making it able to make use of existing population, and some of em are small enough that 20,000 voters could have a profound effect on any state-wide votes.
Of course, 20,000 votes goes a long way in any state with close elections. Maybe they should all move to Florida, instead... more electoral votes, anyway.
The Human Genome Project simply puts biologists and chemists in the general neighborhood for identifiers. It does not by any means isolate diseases.
Not only does it put them in the general neighborhood, but it gives them money to live and support their families while giving their time to research. It finances the research that these patents have built their foundations on. These corporations are just going the last yard and reaping all the money, at the public expense coming and going. That's the patent system at its worst.
No, they are patenting the technique of looking for that gene for the sake of identifying a future cancer victim.
That is as sleazy as it gets. Just as Congress prohibits patenting devices whose primary purpose is illegal, it should prohibit patenting applications that the public should have a right to, straight out of the gate. Or put in place a system of nationalizing / eminiment domaining patents in the public good, with fair compensation. And before you cry me an economic libertarian river, governments (and EL's) have no problem nationalizing the private property of the *poor* for things like new stadiums, they just balk at taking away things from people with money.
And I don't believe this would cause a stagnation of research, because the research is largely being done at the public expense, and corporations could still find ways to patent effective treatments (although if they are as greedy SOBs in that arena as they are in testing procedures, those could conceivably be ED'd as well). If corporations couldn't find a way to turn a buck based on such a large amount of publicly-financed research, then screw em. We the people will get the same treatments and drugs, patent free, a little later, and be better for it.
Govt grants are one thing. Universities on the other hand have every right to patent what they've funded. Provide me with proof that the majority of these patent applications come from public funds and I'll say you have an argument.
The company could be patenting drugs that make use of the knowledge as a treatment, without holding a patent on the actual gene. They could even try patenting a particular method of testing for the gene, but then an alternate testing wouldn't infringe. But, as the gene can be tested without manufacturing or offering for sale the patented "invention", I don't know how they exactly would even have an infringement suit. Maybe bio patents are under different laws, but I thought they were just an interpretation of existing patent law.
I'm glad Ontario is giving them the finger. This is just sick.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone here notice yet that the popular opinion on this discussion is that who does the damned EU think they are to regulate how Nintendo can sell their product; whereas on SuSe Linux will run Microsoft Office, it's all about how MS is an evil monopoly that needs to be regulated?
/. crowd loves busting on Evil Devil-Worshipping MS but will defend to the death their Beloved Happy Shiny NES, even though the actual differences in behavior might be quite slim.
First, some information. The decision wasn't made based on how Nintendo wants to set prices. All you free-traders are right - they can do whatever they want. However, the laws they admitted to breaking concerned their price-fixing, not their pricing, ie their strong-arm tactics in preventing distributors from selling their products in countries where Nintendo wanted to price them higher. This is exactly not free-trade.
A couple of thoughts:
(1) There are completely different people making the arguments. None of the free-traders are hanging out on the SuSe Linux discussion, but they're coming out in numbers here.
(2) The
(3) ?
That's what I love about slashdot. The diversity of the uninformed opinions... =)
...or ordering it from somewhere else
That's the whole point! They were fined for attempting to restrict trade between EU states, to prevent people and retailers from "ordering it from somewhere else".
However, if they break the backwards compatibility, they should (be forced to) maintain and sell the old office and keep patching those security holes in the previous version. After all, they are declared a monopoly by US judges, and forcing users to upgrade their entire system in order to install Office software would be outrageous.
Are you in America? It's very unlikely in this country that any court can/should/would force a company to continue supporting a product it doesn't want to. There are exceptions where public safety is concerned. If someone found a bug that Office documents could cause a computer to catch fire, and not just a little one but a *fireball*, then, yes, a court could force them to do a recall and upgrade (although, for PR's sake, they'd probably do it voluntarily). But because you want to support new file formats? Fuhgettaboutit.
When you're buying Office, you're expecting to be able to use that software as long as you can find computers that can run it. I know, MS wants to change the licensing model. They're allowed to, you know. If it makes money, then they were right. If it costs them a lot of business, which it probably will, then they were wrong.
Bottom line: not spending valuable time supporting products that most people don't own anymore and won't make them much money, freeing up developers to work on new products that can actually make money is better business (and evolutionary) sense than the other way around. So companies do that. If they didn't, they would die.
I'm really surprised to hear that one guy likes the AIM system better.. I'm an old time ICQ user (funny how many people on this discussion mention low UINs (I'm 8922xx btw =) ), so maybe i'm biased, but i was so pissed that my nicknames were already registered. 8922xx in my book isn't any harder to remember than randomidiot420, and i'd be more confident if my nickname didn't match up with the one i told the other person when i gave them my UIN that they wouldn't message a total stranger (randomidiot1010220) thinking it was me.
Jeezus. Haven't used ICQ since 98 and I can still remember my UIN. What's my AIM again?
A lot of people died when the stock market "shut down" in 1929.
Tell me about it. I'm gonna throw myself off the roof if Old Man Murray doesn't come back online by the end of the week.
I don't know what I'd do if the entire *Internet* shut down...
=)
Oh wait, he already did.
If you don't get the joke, you should look through his previous posts. About half of them are shills for amazon using his referrer tag.
I used to think you just saw an opening to score a few bucks on a referral off of the slashdot community, but I just realized that's the entire reason you post. And those are just the times you've done it in the last week. Oh and here's another.
I notice you turn off your signature when your entire post is a referral scam.
I couldn't imagine a sleazier way to make a few bucks. Disclose the fact that your tags have referrer links. It wouldn't hurt your "sales" and it would certainly help your karma. And I don't mean your slashdot karma...
Almost makes you want to whip out a gun and start shooting, doesn't it? =)
I think you're advocating for Government to license under BSD, which makes sense to me. Your last sentence made it a little unclear.
I think it makes sense for the Feds to use a BSD license for original software creations, as one of their goals is to allow businesses to profit from the research. This is so much better than selling the research to one corporation because it allows the public-at-large the same rights to their software. If one of the citizenry runs with the project, and turns it into something new, and GPLs it, all the better. Then the corps can decide whether they want to use the better GPLd version or the worse one under the BSD.
What doesn't make sense? This has been discussed to death the last couple of days. The BSDL is a better fit, given the Feds' stated interests in preserving business and public exploitations of funded research.
What would be nice is to see more government projects start from a GPL software base, like the still-very-much-alive-and-well SELinux project. I wish this had more support from the community, as right now it's only the wizards that are touching it. If more people got sucked into it, they probably would, in typical Linux fashion, start making it more accessible to the power user with less than several days to devote to moving over his existing setup to an SELinux box. The curve right now is pretty steep.
I got side-tracked. My point was that if more government projects started from a GPL base, then all the work they did on top of it would automatically be available to us, and Mr. Smith's parent corporation wouldn't be involved at that point.
BSDL for new work, GPL for modifying existing projects. The public benefits most.
From the Wired article:
Red Hat general counsel Mark Webbink speculated that some members of Congress may have signed the anti-GPL note without fully realizing what they were doing. "I think they were probably hastened into something that most of them would now recognize as not being that well advised," he said.
How often do we hear this explanation for some dumb move by politicians? Is it fair to expect them to even read letters or legislation before endorsing them? How many have claimed surprise at what they found out was in the DMCA, or the Patriot Act? Will they do it now with Smith's letter? I don't think I'm as forgiving as Mr. Webbink...
In other words, as we all know, Smith is bought and paid for and owned by MS
For $22,900? They got him cheap. Talk about a depressed economy - even the government boys are feeling the pinch. ; )
Christ at those rates I could afford my own Congressman... I hear it's the best investment you can make. Maybe I can send him back to Washington pushing the schlach agenda. Wow, my own pet Congressman... I'd play with him and feed him everyday... =p
Even if this specific guy is not an MS shill, how many people who defend MS here are? Keep up your cynicism, review the record, they haven't changed.
... And then to establish my credibility even further, I'd tell people my entire plan, in case they suspected as much...
I couldn't agree more. I hate when I post jokes at Microsoft's expense, and they get modded down by MS zealots. As far as being anybody's shill, I stand by my track record. My real issue is intelligence and open-mindedness on Slashdot. The strength of the community increases when we don't sound like a bunch of reactionary zealots, ourselves.
Actually, what I think would be a better plot if I were 'Astroturfing' (?), would be to post an accusatory comment calling into question my objectivity, and allowing me to post comments testifying to my credibility, thereby heading off others' potential criticism. Kinda like the whole Republicans and Democrats being owned by the same guy. Or Coke and Pepsi.
Wrap your head around that... ; )
Who's gonna out-paranoid who? =)
Oh, nothing personal. It just made sense to me, like in a voice conversation, you reply to the person who just spoke, even when you're talking in a group. Sorta. Just following the thread...
I think you misunderstood my intent. I was ridiculing the argument that the butterfly men were Evil, simply because they posed a distraction. I agree that it's nonsensical, but it's going on in other parts of the discussion as we speak. I read several comments to that effect.
Does anyone else feel ridiculous saying "the butterfly men"?
At some point, the worm will be detected, thus the slow infection rate will not be optimal.
I propose that a breakthrough was made in the modularity of worm systems last year, with Code Red and Nimda. The infection mechanism can be separated from the intelligence/communication module and payload. Does anyone know how many machines are still infected by Nimda?? It's staggering. You could have a worm that only spread to machines already infected by Nimda, and virtually guarantee that it would never be detected. You'd 0wN a staggering number of machines, your worm could close off others access to the same cmd.exe sitting in the web root, increasing survival chances for your host (less likely to be taken down), and you could do all the intelligent communication you wanted. Better yet, design a mechanism so that later versions of your worm will replace previous ones, so you can release updates as the design becomes more sophisticated. The possibilities are endless. As much time as you want to tinker with the perfect intelligent worm design, and you don't even have to write the infection module yourself.
I think wormnet design is one of the coolest theoretical exercises in CS... the problem right now is that there's no incentive to write intelligent worms (ie WormNet), because the unintelligent ones are so effective. Nimda was spotted almost immediately. It's still one of the worst. What's that tell you? When authors stop thinking about the individual worm, and start thinking that each worm is just a cell in a collective online entity... well, i'm kind of soured on calling things a paradigm shift, so I won't say.. d'oh!
Ok, I must have missed the story about the IBM San-Fran chalking faisco, but someone posted the relevant links. The real IDG story, and the exclusive coverage of the IDG story, at the Register.
The short story is that IBM got caught spraypainting / chalking Tux and the caption "Peace, Love, and Linux" on the sidewalks of numerous street corners all over the city. They claimed it was "biodegradable", if not "easily water soluble" chalk, and were banking on it disappearing the next time it rained. It didn't. The article doesn't mention whether it eventually did wash off, after several rains (think back to college days - did that chalk only last one rainfall?), or whether they had to break down and have it removed first.
I have a picture of one of the MSN butterflies applied to the 7th Avenue Station sign, but I don't know where to post it. You'd say it was quite tasteful if you saw it. It looks like part of the sign. I hear a lot of arguments about why MS's campaign is evil, whereas IBM's was just and righteous. I'm going to play Devil's Advocate for a minute here, since no one else seems to want to.
I don't want to hear anyone in this country say that the reason MS's campaign is evil is because they create waste. I'm not saying they don't, but is that the reason that you think fast-food, snail-mail solicitations from charitable organizations, and buying soda is evil? Let's be honest about how much waste we all generate, whether or not we're tacking up little butterflies to subway stations...
And the rollerbladers are evil, not because they are generating waste, but because they're a "distraction". A pedestrian might walk into an open manhole because they were too distracted by the butterfly men. Uh huh. MS has pretty deep pockets. Let the frivolous lawsuits begin. If you can squeeze any money out of their lawyers, you've earned it.
What's that leave? Evil because they're advertising for MSN 8, instead of a righteous cause such as Linux, therefore anything they do, regardless of eco-friendliness and distractive potential is Evil? I don't think a rational argument can be made for or against that, so I don't want to debate it.
MS is evil, because IBM did it first. Hate to disappoint, but IBM did not invent the concept of publicity stunt. I have no idea how far back it goes, but in modern times I've got a reference here for 1917 before the original release of the first Tarzan movie. Harry Reichenbach was hired to promote it, so he anonymously let loose an oranguatan dressed in a tuxedo inside a fancy hotel filled with New York elite. The newspapers had a field day, and a few days later, Reichenbach called to let them know that it had been a stunt for Tarzan, so they covered it again, this time letting everyone know it had been for the movie. Tarzan made a killing at the box-office.
As far as I'm concerned, every publicity stunt since then has been Evil. Evil! (whoops, I think I lost my serious edge. Anyway, my source on the Tarzan story is Uncle John's Biggest Ever Bathroom Reader, from the scholarly "Bathroom Reader's Institute", which is an absolute crack-pipe for trivia junkies like myself.)
You may now resume the one-sided witchhunt. =)
Killing a life before it ever has a chance to live is wrong. And whether it is illegal or not is irrelevant - it doesn't make it right.
I couldn't agree with you more, which is why I assert that abstinence is the biggest killer of unborn children in America. Abstinence is prescribed by law if she's under age. Help us repeal the Age of Consent laws, and less children will be murdered by abstinence every year... ; )
Why don't I ever hear that argument coming from Jerry Fallwell...
I still believe that people who feel they are mature enough, and responsible enough to engage in sex, need to be mature enough and responsible enough to accept this reduced risk.
Perhaps, but I don't think the decision to have an abortion is one that is taken in the absence of maturity and responsibility. It is a very difficult decision. I don't think anyone gets a giddy little thrill from "beating the system". The decision is made when the mother cannot responsibly care for the baby. If a foolish fourteen year old gets pregnant, what kind of life has she determined for herself and the baby? She may have to drop out of school, tank dreams of college, to care for her baby. She may be thrown out of the house by her parents in her time of need. She may resent the child for ruining her life. What kind of environment might the baby grow up in at that point? If she decides to have an abortion, it may be the most responsible thing she can do at that point. It's not trivial. It can cause lifelong emotional duress. It's a decision that needs to be understood with compassion, not judgement.
No one is pro-abortion. People are pro-choice because they don't want the government, especially one controlled so heavily by the fundamentalist Religious Reich, to be able to dictate one of the most serious decisions a person or couple may ever have to make. It's one of those, "Who are you to tell me how to live my life?" kinds of jobs. But the Right is very prescriptive, the way Christian missionaries have always been. I don't know what makes them tick, but I have a hard time believing it's a sincere committment to saving souls. But that's a different topic.
Every child wanted, every child loved. Massive overpopulation isn't doing anyone any favors, either. And the less outside interference in anyone's life, whether it be from relgious governments or governmental religions, the better.
I would like to thank you for not "going off" I am very much in the minority on this issue when it comes to my social circles, and I appreciate the rational conversation on the matter. I usually only encounter closed minded, almost violent responses to my views.
You and me both, my friend. I've never had this argument with anyone who wasn't in it from a fundamentalist (where the hell did that word come from, anyway?) Christian background. And usually their responses are pretty frothing-at-the-mouth, too. I favor a self-deterministic view of government and religion (I hestitate to say "libertarian"). The idea that people weren't made to be subordinate. It's only the meek or unlucky that get subordinated. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for that whole Christ (if not Christian) ethic of "do unto others", "turn the other cheek", "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", etc. So anyone advocating that I be subordinate to their laws/relgious views/whatever doesn't go over real well with me. They better ask real nice.. =)
Alright, alright, haven't been able to get into an abortion argument since high-school, since I went to such a liberal pinko long-haired hippie freak university... =)
Remember, unless they were forced to have sex, they are a willing host.
Unless they were forced, they are willing to have sex. Not to be pregnant. That's why many couples use contraceptives and the jim hat. If pregnancy ensues despite the use of a condom, I'd say the lovers never agreed to be willing hosts.
Jared Diamond makes some interesting theories in his book, The Third Chimpanzee, about the role of sex in evolution. "Our concealed ovulation [he means, a woman's buttocks don't turn blue when she's ovulating], constant receptivity [women engage in sex in between times of ovulation, not just during], and brief fertile period in each menstrual cycle ensure that most copulations by humans are at the wrong time for conception...Whatever the main biological function of human copulation, it isn't contraception, which is just an accoasional by-product." (p. 77-78)
If it were just about giving us a procreative edge, copulation would take much less time than the 4 minutes on average it takes humans, and we'd only do it during a woman's ovulatory period. Other primates spend 15-30 seconds, others a minute. But all less than humans. And baboons would know who's ovulating as soon as they sit down at the bar. But do you?
So, short explanation? His theory is that sex evolved to be so damn great in order to cement the social relationship between a man and a woman, so that the man would remain to rear the offspring. It takes much more fatherly involvement in the raising of human young than that of other species, and a strong bond between man and woman apparently turned out to be a good way of getting Dad to stick around.
And just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. I really hope that the world pulls it's head out of it's ass and realizes that legal murder is going on everywhere.
I'd hope that the world stops sanctioning legal murder in terms of political assassinations. But if everyone everywhere, as you say, is endorsing abortion as better than the alternative of not-abortion, you have to wonder if maybe somebody's thought of something you haven't...
Adam Smith: 2002 Politician Profile
Top Contributors:
(1) Microsoft Corp $22,900
which is more than the next two biggest, combined.
Notable quote from front page:
To be fair, if this guy wasn't pushing MS anti-GPL in DC, he wouldn't be doing a very good job of representing his constituency...
Go to the front page and "Search By Individual Donor" on Microsoft. Sort by size of "donation" (I'm quite certain "political donation" is an oxymoron - political investment might be a better term). It's quite informative.
There's an arena in which Free Software performance will never match commercial...
It seems like a small story from a small news outfit that is quite thin on anything other than Mr. Warby's hearsay. Talk about FUD... but with any news site, no matter how obscure, as soon as it hits the front page of slashdot, it is beyond reproach. That's something we should watch out for, after reading so much yesterday about Alan Sokal's Social Text hoax. In summary, he tricked a popular publication of the literary, postmodern Left into printing a hoax article of his that any amount of editorial review should have uncovered as a hoax, to the discredit of the journal, the editors, and (hopefully) perhaps some of the movement itself.
Let's not be so reactionary that we leave ourselves open to a Sokaling - a doc without any factual basis, that goes unchecked because its conclusions agree with our mindset.
What should also be mentioned is Slashdot's ability to make the news. We're a publication with a large circulation, that doesn't do much fact checking before our editors endorse an article. (I know that we never set out to be a reputable news site, but when google's news is referencing us as the top source on a story... I'd be happy if we just held ourselves to a higher bar.) If the Smallsville Post carries a totally unresearched article that doesn't ever leave the downtown coffee shop area, and LexLutherCorp doesn't even bother returning a comment on it, and suddenly the Daily Planet, without doing any more investigating, just decides to reprint it to its own (much-larger) readership... well, it bites when the article turns out to be crap.
Now that it's been slashBotted, the article will probably get a response from MS PR, something along the lines of, "Don't be silly, of course Microsoft has the highest committment to customer data confidentiality, as part of our TrustWorthy Computing (TM) Initiative. All of the data we use comes from version numbers, and we leave the option for customers to completely disable the Microsoft Windows Update feature. Look at how paranoid and reactionary this bunch of misfits is. Snort. Linux users... " =)
Let's win the spin war Larry Wall style, not MS style.
my 2 cents...
Jared Diamond made the argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel that all major epidemics (small pox, plague, etc) have arisen from our close association with domesticated animals (mainly pigs, dirty SOBs). The lack of domesticated animals by the New World population was the reason he cites for the one-sidedness of the spread of epidemics to/fro the European invaders.
Which makes sense, I guess, if you figure that evolutionarily we could handle our own microbes and infectious organisms well before we started domesticating other animals ~ 9000 years ago. We couldn't handle the infectious organisms they showed us (so much). And it's been nothing but good times ever since.
Who knows what lies in wait for the future? Without having precisely all the facts, I'm predicting that every recipient of a pig-grown organ will one morning wake up in a mindless trance, stumbling around attacking humans and mumbling "braaaaaaiiinnns" until bludgeoned or shot in the head. There was a George Romero documentary about something similar in the 60s...
(My brother holds that the Christian Right isn't conservative - they're liberal with a different set of values.)
Not liberal, but quite radical.
I like to refer to them collectively as the Religious Reich. Last time I checked, that domain was still available. =) I always hoped someone would put up an anti-censorship page there...
Some states in that bunch have a history of liberty-mindedness, making it able to make use of existing population, and some of em are small enough that 20,000 voters could have a profound effect on any state-wide votes.
Of course, 20,000 votes goes a long way in any state with close elections. Maybe they should all move to Florida, instead... more electoral votes, anyway.
The Human Genome Project simply puts biologists and chemists in the general neighborhood for identifiers. It does not by any means isolate diseases.
Not only does it put them in the general neighborhood, but it gives them money to live and support their families while giving their time to research. It finances the research that these patents have built their foundations on. These corporations are just going the last yard and reaping all the money, at the public expense coming and going. That's the patent system at its worst.
No, they are patenting the technique of looking for that gene for the sake of identifying a future cancer victim.
That is as sleazy as it gets. Just as Congress prohibits patenting devices whose primary purpose is illegal, it should prohibit patenting applications that the public should have a right to, straight out of the gate. Or put in place a system of nationalizing / eminiment domaining patents in the public good, with fair compensation. And before you cry me an economic libertarian river, governments (and EL's) have no problem nationalizing the private property of the *poor* for things like new stadiums, they just balk at taking away things from people with money.
And I don't believe this would cause a stagnation of research, because the research is largely being done at the public expense, and corporations could still find ways to patent effective treatments (although if they are as greedy SOBs in that arena as they are in testing procedures, those could conceivably be ED'd as well). If corporations couldn't find a way to turn a buck based on such a large amount of publicly-financed research, then screw em. We the people will get the same treatments and drugs, patent free, a little later, and be better for it.
Govt grants are one thing. Universities on the other hand have every right to patent what they've funded. Provide me with proof that the majority of these patent applications come from public funds and I'll say you have an argument.
No, he's right.
The company could be patenting drugs that make use of the knowledge as a treatment, without holding a patent on the actual gene. They could even try patenting a particular method of testing for the gene, but then an alternate testing wouldn't infringe. But, as the gene can be tested without manufacturing or offering for sale the patented "invention", I don't know how they exactly would even have an infringement suit. Maybe bio patents are under different laws, but I thought they were just an interpretation of existing patent law.
I'm glad Ontario is giving them the finger. This is just sick.