Can anyone explain to me what would make US lawmakers vote in favour of this bill? It seems like the kind of thing that any semi-sentient 14 year-old would be able to critically dissect as narf idea in about 12 seconds.
The answer to your question comes in two parts:
1. They are not 14 years old.
2. They are not even semi-sentient.
Re:Separating Linux users from Windows users
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The Spyware Inferno
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I can't believe something a post as stupid as the parent's gets modded up, even for a few minutes.
Windows users don't allow spamware because they're guilty about piracy. Most of the users I've seen with large amounts of spyware wouldn't even download a free MP3; the only thing they download is their email or the latest forum page refresh, off AOL. They get spyware because of cluelessness about computers, not guilt.
The 15-year-olds who install spyware-filled filesharing programs don't feel guilty either; they use them for the same reason they use Internet Explorer. They don't know any better program, and their friends all use the same thing.
On the other hand, the savvy Linux copyright violator (not thief; copyright violation is not theft according to the law) will just use Mutella to share his MP3s, which has no weird restrictions and runs on the command line if so desired.
Doesn't anyone else here see the absurdity
of providing high-quality software (via your
precious time) for free to the corporations
that do not give us their technology, food
or services for free?
No, because you're not providing it for free, really. You're providing half of it for free.
High-quality software is worthless to any large organization, be it a government or corporation, without high-quality support. And support costs money. A corporation will pay someone money if they like the software; there's no question about it. It might even be you, if you put out a good software package and sell support services for it. If not, that's your problem. You could keep your code closely guarded so no one could possibly do anything evil with it. Or you could license the code in such a way that the user contributes to society or the world of computing by using it.
If a corporation is not an end-user, the GPL can be used to ensure legally that the corporation must release source to anything it makes (again, for "free") using your code. This means that if a group incorporates your code, they are, essentially, giving you some of their technology for free.
Heck, judging by the stories here it seems the iPod is more popular in the US than the mobile phone!
That's because you're on Slashdot, where people love Apple devices and often hate the yammering that comes with cell phones, not to mention their "yuppie" associations. If judging only by stories and comments here, an observer would be unable to understand why "American Idol" or "The Bachelor" is on prime time TV when everyone seems to love $CANCELLED_NERDY_SCI_FI_SHOW.
Mobile phone use is about the same in America as it is in Europe. The difference is mostly that people in Europe (I've heard) and in Asia (I've seen firsthand) often use their phones primarily for text messaging. Here in the US, most don't. I'm not sure why, my guess is that we're just too lazy to learn how to type on the telephone pad.:)
Mobile phone market penetration is high in the US, but the "gee-whiz" factor has definitely worn off among all but the hardcore. Most people are more interested what kind of a deal they can get on the minutes they use than whether their phone can play MP3s.
I would be against this sort of thing being provided by the local government. This is not the purpose of government.
The local government is actually the perfect place for it if enough people in the city actually want it. There is nothing wrong with a small government, participated in at a local level, voting for a convenience for the city.
Of course, the above is in a perfect world. City governments are often owned by special interests such as corporations, or even a local mafia -- both of whom try to get the voted-on service outsourced to themselves. In my city, the local city council often votes for the most expensive and least useful things it can get (right now, for instance, there's a movement to get a major league baseball team, and a multi-billion-dollar project to bury all the reservoirs in a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 just got cancelled -- but not after spending 4 million dollars on preparation for it). It really depends on how involved the citizens of the city were in the decision.
Re:I'm buying Fahrenheit 9/11 the day it comes out
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Guerrilla Drive-Ins
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Facts, even statistics, need not be dull; they are often just treated in a dull manner. If my tinfoil hat had shown up yet (still on back order), I'd say that They (insert whatever group you want) had planned it that way...having someone old, white, and monotonous talk about important things. They have someone young, hip, and beautiful talk about the entertaining, uninformative junk, and what do people watch?
I agree with you about Moore basically being entertaining propaganda (he's the liberal answer to Rush Limbaugh), but I should warn that saying "most voters have no attention span...are susceptible to propaganda...etc" is a very dangerous thing to say to oneself. If you listen to the people most would consider complete lunatics, at the far right and left of the political spectrum, you'll notice that one of the main credos of both sets are, "People are sheep. If they really thought about things and had the right facts presented to them, they'd be on my side. Too bad $OTHERSIDE, which owns the media and controls the government, has brainwashed them. It's up to me to present the facts they obviously missed, so they can put $MYGROUP in power." It apparently never occurs to such groups that people might not like their extreme ideas or think they're the right ones.
This type of thinking is elitism in one of its nastiest forms, could be (not sure yet) slowly spreading towards the mainstream, and is setting us toward a path of dictatorship, either by the left or right wing (both types of dictatorship are equally bad, I assure you). What other alternative is there to a dictatorship if the people's decisions or way of thinking are not respected?
Although I'm sure a lot of important information drops below the radar screen, oftentimes it's only unimportant to people because people prioritize based on how close the news is to them, not because they're incapable of making good decisions without being told what to do. The fellow poisoning dogs near their neighborhood and the nasty car accident last night get first priority. The guys in suits talking about the economic indicators in dreary voices get last. FOX is not popular because it distributes propaganda; it often doesn't mention politics at all. FOX is popular because it shows people what they are interested in and presents it in an interesting way. Convince people that your news hits them close to home or is worth thinking about, and you've convinced them that your news is worth listening to.
Long rant, I know, and somewhat off your topic, but I've been thinking about it a while and decided to try to formulate it. Feel free to disagree.
Don't have any; I've got great vision. But I had a co-worker for a while who got laser eye surgery. He was happy as hell; took a couple days off from work just to walk around and look at all the stuff he'd been missing.
That said, keep in mind that A. YMMV (usually said about software, not your fricking eyeballs! and B. No one knows what this'll do 20 years later.
I never did either, but that's because I was a GIF user (at the time of the controversy). Most software developers dumped it because Unisys started sending nasty legal letters to a lot of people, not because they were unreasonably paranoid.
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
It's YRO not because GIFs could violate your rights online, but because Unisys, the holder of a submarine patent on GIFs, could. That's one of the main reasons we switched to PNG. Now the patent expired, meaning our rights to use GIFs, without getting the pants sued off us, are back.
Please increase your clue level before posting. The article is correctly filed.
I've never understood the thinking that if life was found on another planet, all religious people's (they mean "Judeo-Christian and maybe Islamic", not "religious") heads would explode, and God Himself would vanish in a puff of logic. What's to stop God from creating life on another planet?
The idea that Earth was the center of the universe originated with some Greek philosophers (Aristotle and Ptolemy were among these), and the idea was actually quite controversial even then. The only reason why it became canonical (plenty of Christian scientists, including Johannes Kepler, argued against it) was that it was one of the few things left from the ruin of the ancient world by the time monastic scribes got hold of it, and the ancients were so impressive that it was hard to imagine anyone one-upping them at the time. Such a theory is never mentioned explicitly in the Bible, and it's pretty doubtful that any religious person would care about its collapse. Unless there are still Christians who believe that the orbit of any planet can be described by a perfect circle...
While quite conservative, I don't think it's that bad. Eventually the fake thugs (Slashdot is too kind; in my school, we called them wiggers) will have to get a job, where they (sometimes) learn to treat people with respect, or end up trapped in the MTV dreamworld once the fad wears off, derided by everyone in reality (mullets may have looked cool 20 years ago, but anyone still wearing one now gets a few snickers from any onlookers).
Teenagers have been affected by mindless consumer culture, which is what you are describing, ever since their existence was first admitted (late 50s or so). This current generation will grow out of it like all the rest did, and hopefully some of them will become a little older and wiser.
They do, but some standards are better than others. As my parents always said, "If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?"
Standards are intended to make things easier by making parts interchangable and machinery work in an expected way. This works fine for engineering, science, and a few other things, but certainly not for politics, and possibly not for economics. Nations are not interchangable parts; when you deal with a nation, you're really dealing with the people of that nation, with different values, goals, and beliefs. Standardizing machinery works well; standardizing mechanical standards works somewhat, depending on who goes along with it; standardizing people does not work well at all.
Mechanical standards such as GSM are not really being shot down by the US; they're being shot down by US companies who don't want to have to redo their infrastructure (which is understandable, although it sucks; they'll eventually have to fall in, now that AT&T is offering GSM). But then we come to political standards...
International Court of Justice - agreed way of trying cross border disputes and crimes against humanity... right again.
Ummm, wrong. There was a clear reason why we didn't ratify it; so every country that had a problem with us couldn't fill the court with frivolous lawsuits. Signing that treaty would have been like walking naked into a state prison with no cigarettes.
That'll only work until some honorable company's competitor sends spam in an attempt to get them in trouble with the law.
The real problem is technical (SMTP), and will remain technical; legislative attempts are doomed to failure because most of the worst spammers are criminals already; what's one law (treaty, not even law, in this case) more or less to break?
Shanghai Knights was horrible, maybe the tenth worst movie I have ever seen. Even putting Jackie Chan in it couldn't redeem it. I vowed never to watch another flick with Owen Wilson in it (a vow previously made regarding Adam Sandler, too).
Chris Tucker is bad, but Owen Wilson is far worse.
You can strike the "Longhorn resembles WindowMaker" part off your list. WindowMaker (along with AfterStep) was basically designed to provide the look 'n' feel of the NeXTStep desktop, IIRC.
It's very pretty and lightweight (I use it on a Toshiba Libretto with a 120MHz proc), but it's not original, and certainly doesn't derive much from the Unix philosophy.
Re:Welcome to the Dark Ages.
on
P2P Bits
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· Score: 2, Insightful
When watching a movie like Fahrenheit 9/11 can make your blood boil, and still people don't do anything.
Umm...offtopic, but I still feel constrained to reply: Fahrenheit 9/11 is a "mockumentary". It is not real life. It is a carefully collected montage of video clips designed to preach to the choir. The people who listen to Michael Moore and Al Franken and take them seriously are no different than the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter; they're listening to what they want to hear.
There are a lot of good people to listen to on both sides of the fence, and you can usually find them because 1. They don't resort to childish insults and ad hominem attacks, and 2. They acknowledge the other side's viewpoint and might even agree with some points. Watching Fahrenheit 9/11 might get a chuckle out of some, but your blood isn't going to boil.
And actually, the fact that we have people whose blood will boil over an extremely biased presentation of exactly what they want to hear is the reason why we get such crummy elected officials. People thinking, "Well, he's basically the same as Bush...but...he's not Bush! He says so all the time! I'll vote for him!" or "He's crazy and he spends most of his time fellating the record industry...but at least he's a Republican! I'll vote for him!" will hurt us even worse in the years to come than they are already doing now.
The problem with waiting for the situation to get absurd (IMHO, it already has) is that yes, maybe the big companies will come to their senses...but it might be after a world of hurt has fallen on small innovators such as open source developers. As you say:
Eventually, doing anything even remotely fun, interesting, or productive will be so expensive that the system will crash and burn under it's own bloat.
Just as Disney proved by appeasing these nitwits, it will be much easier (for a while) for large companies to just pay the IP sharks off. What if that state of affairs lasts for ten, twenty years, with FOSS projects as well as any new small software business dropping right and left? I don't want to be forced to get a rich patron with 500 lawyers on call just in order to develop a small app.
I see your point, but this absurd-patent craze reminds me of the Soviet Union's experiment with communism. Yeah, it fizzled out after a while when the system became unusable, but there are a whole lot of East Europeans who wish it had fizzled out in 1917.
I wouldn't mind verbing so much if the right usage hadn't been drilled into me as a kid...but "verbing" the word "architect" is not a language advancement. It's a sloppy shortcut normally used in buzz-speak (that's why you almost never hear it in everyday English, but so often in computer- and business-related fields). It's ambiguous and makes English even more difficult to understand than it is already. The fact that enough people complained about it for this thread to occur shows that in fact, it is not "just a prescriptivist language maven" who hates this, but everyone who cringes when someone writes "effect" for "affect", or says "irregardlessly". Most verbing is the result of a current fad, and anyone who's over ten years old knows how fast most fad-generated words disappear.
To quote Bill Watterson (who, AFAIK, created the word "verbing" as "to make a noun into a verb"), "Verbing weirds things."
Your points are all perfectly valid. That's why I don't recommend Slackware to the casual user. If you want to see what this whole "compooter" thing is about, run SuSE, Fedora, or (zealots, please have mercy) Windows.:) If you want to have a fairly user-friendly system with minimal viruses and spyware, at low cost, run any of the first two. If you want to get your feet wet, try Knoppix; it doesn't require any drastic alterations to your current system since it's a LiveCD, and it's pretty usable.
If you're knowledgable about Linux, like a hands-on install where you get to manage your system without those pesky wizards and auto-generators getting in the way, don't mind BSD-style FS layouts, and don't expect everything to be handed to you...for God's sake do yourself a favor and run Slackware. You will thank me later.
I should mention that I define "later" as "after you manually install your drivers by looking up the names and opts in the kernel docs and uncommenting the requisite rc.modules entries in vi, exclude your PCMCIA IRQs 7 and 10 (your machine will lock up), call the Korean manufacturer of your monitor (your system is down, right? So you have no network) to figure out what to put in the XFree86Config, and add your SMB connector (missing by default) to your CUPS connector list...etc."
Why don't we put it another way? "Note that both people involved were guys. By its traditional discrimination against women (who more civilized) in favor of men (more aggressive and violent), IT is introducing a security risk since men will take more chances." It makes as much sense as the above "these damn' kids screw up all the time" rant (and before some/. feminist says "you go girl!", I should add that I'm male, 23, and consider both arguments completely idiotic).
IT is a younger field, therefore more IT guys are younger. Granted, it's been around for the last 40 years, but for about half of that time, you needed a lot of money to get a computer. The generation that got to use truly cheap computers came of age just ten years ago. It's natural that there is now an explosion of younger IT workers.
Marital, family, religious, and civic ties to society, IMHO, are much more likely to keep people honest than their age, even counting the fact that younger workers may be less experienced. And if you don't believe me, check a newspaper and see how many older, powerful men are at this moment headed to Club Fed because they weren't any better at ethics than the AOL dimwits mentioned in this article. Most of Congress is composed of older men, and I'd almost rather have Sanford Wallace (of Cyber Promotions infamy) representing me than some of these folks.
I work in a government agency, so I see a large proportion of older workers. Some are smart, hard workers; others are idiots. I see no larger proportion of idiots among younger people than I do among older ones, nor do I see any indication that the intelligence or ethics of the old have anything to do with the fact that they are old.
Since plenty of the spam relates back to overseas sources, you'll never see them spending time in a US jail. Simply enough, you'd never see every government in the world agreeing on enforcement of any law, even an anti-spam law. In a lot of countries, it's rather difficult to even report the spam. What happens when you're trying to report it, and the support people don't speak English. And don't be so egotistical to say "they should all speak English", the universe or even the Internet doesn't revolve around America.
As seen on a forum sig: "If it ain't English...it's gibberish.":)
The real problem in that arena is not lack of English skills (most of the computer-literate world can speak at least pidgin English, even if their messages sound like quotes from Zero Wing), but lack of desire to block spam. There exists a hatred of spam in the US and most European countries, but in third-world countries, it's often only looked at as a business opportunity.
That cultural difference is part of the problem...but foreign ISPs are just a drop in the bucket. The biggest source of spam is right here in America, in the form of computer users with too much broadband and no common sense. Hence Comcast's actions -- IMHO, a Good Thing judging from how much spam I get relayed through Comcast lusers.
The parent poster is perfectly correct. As everyone else's distro works harder and harder to out-bloat Windows, Slackware continues the original Linux ideal of a bloat-free, yet feature-rich, OS distro.
Part of MS's advantage is that it's run by a single set of libraries that get loaded in the OS at the start. They may not be good libraries, but they're ONE SET of libraries. Linux has plenty of good ones, but you need millions of them; every programmer of each individual app wants to reinvent the wheel or use something obscure, so memory use goes straight to the bad place. Users are forced to be smart about what they run, and Slackware definitely helps with that more than larger distros, which takes everything and the kitchen sink, and dumps it in the user's all-too-willing lap. "Sure, I'd like to install (?:G|K)Louse-Picker.0009a! Who knows, I might need it someday! Oh. I guess I need to install 300 dependencies...well Linux is always faster than M$, so I guess installing all those on my 300MHz 128MB Dell won't hurt it a bit!"
I don't feel much sympathy for all the RedHat refugees. If you want Windows, just get Windows. I know you won't be as hip then, but trust me, your personal computing experience will be better. Or buy a Mac; then you'll be even cooler than if you used Linux on a PC, if a little bit poverty-stricken.
IMHO, WindowMaker is the most beautiful WM one can use outside of Gnome/KDE. I ran Linux on my Toshiba Libretto, and WindowMaker was the obvious choice (since the Libretto has only 32Mb RAM and a 120MHz proc). The only one I've seen to even remotely compete with it in the lightweight class is AfterStep.
If somebody gets an old laptop and wants to run "just a word processor and a web browser" on it, WindowMaker is the way to go.
Probably a troll...but what the hell, I'll assume it's a real question...
But, to get back to the original point, I find it highly unnerving that the country that claims to be the world's foremost democracy holds democratic ideals in such low regard. If the majority of countries decides one thing, why does the US so often do the exact opposite?
Answer: Because we (I say "we" as in "Americans", since I'm one) are not citizens of the world, despite what progressives would like to think. We do not answer to a world government -- such a thing does not exist, although there's a club that we're members of called the UN, which has done things like electing the Sudan to the UN Human Rights Committee. We answer to the United States of America, and its Constitution is the final authority unless we decide to amend it (that's why they call it a free country).
There are many good reasons for this; for one thing, it means that pissants on the other side of the world don't get to tell us what to do. In fact, originally the law was set up to ensure that not even the folks in Washington, DC could tell us what to do in most cases. The federal government became more powerful over time, but every now and then states' rights get asserted (John Ashcroft getting rebuked by the courts for his attempt to shut down the Oregon assisted-suicide legalization is a prime, recent example).
The US was formed on the principle of self-determination, and that means that we do not have to accede to the rules of another country if they violate our laws (i.e. the Constitution). Which, judging from the article, is a good thing. Europeans are always giving Americans a hard time about how we're so corporate-friendly, but I don't see much difference myself; if anything, it seems like the EU and UK governments are trying to outdo us in bending over and grabbing the socks for the Arrr Aye Double A.
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone explain to me what would make US lawmakers vote in favour of this bill? It seems like the kind of thing that any semi-sentient 14 year-old would be able to critically dissect as narf idea in about 12 seconds.
The answer to your question comes in two parts:
1. They are not 14 years old.
2. They are not even semi-sentient.
I can't believe something a post as stupid as the parent's gets modded up, even for a few minutes.
Windows users don't allow spamware because they're guilty about piracy. Most of the users I've seen with large amounts of spyware wouldn't even download a free MP3; the only thing they download is their email or the latest forum page refresh, off AOL. They get spyware because of cluelessness about computers, not guilt.
The 15-year-olds who install spyware-filled filesharing programs don't feel guilty either; they use them for the same reason they use Internet Explorer. They don't know any better program, and their friends all use the same thing.
On the other hand, the savvy Linux copyright violator (not thief; copyright violation is not theft according to the law) will just use Mutella to share his MP3s, which has no weird restrictions and runs on the command line if so desired.
Doesn't anyone else here see the absurdity of providing high-quality software (via your precious time) for free to the corporations that do not give us their technology, food or services for free?
No, because you're not providing it for free, really. You're providing half of it for free.
High-quality software is worthless to any large organization, be it a government or corporation, without high-quality support. And support costs money. A corporation will pay someone money if they like the software; there's no question about it. It might even be you, if you put out a good software package and sell support services for it. If not, that's your problem. You could keep your code closely guarded so no one could possibly do anything evil with it. Or you could license the code in such a way that the user contributes to society or the world of computing by using it.
If a corporation is not an end-user, the GPL can be used to ensure legally that the corporation must release source to anything it makes (again, for "free") using your code. This means that if a group incorporates your code, they are, essentially, giving you some of their technology for free.
Heck, judging by the stories here it seems the iPod is more popular in the US than the mobile phone!
That's because you're on Slashdot, where people love Apple devices and often hate the yammering that comes with cell phones, not to mention their "yuppie" associations. If judging only by stories and comments here, an observer would be unable to understand why "American Idol" or "The Bachelor" is on prime time TV when everyone seems to love $CANCELLED_NERDY_SCI_FI_SHOW.
Mobile phone use is about the same in America as it is in Europe. The difference is mostly that people in Europe (I've heard) and in Asia (I've seen firsthand) often use their phones primarily for text messaging. Here in the US, most don't. I'm not sure why, my guess is that we're just too lazy to learn how to type on the telephone pad. :)
Mobile phone market penetration is high in the US, but the "gee-whiz" factor has definitely worn off among all but the hardcore. Most people are more interested what kind of a deal they can get on the minutes they use than whether their phone can play MP3s.
I would be against this sort of thing being provided by the local government. This is not the purpose of government.
The local government is actually the perfect place for it if enough people in the city actually want it. There is nothing wrong with a small government, participated in at a local level, voting for a convenience for the city.
Of course, the above is in a perfect world. City governments are often owned by special interests such as corporations, or even a local mafia -- both of whom try to get the voted-on service outsourced to themselves. In my city, the local city council often votes for the most expensive and least useful things it can get (right now, for instance, there's a movement to get a major league baseball team, and a multi-billion-dollar project to bury all the reservoirs in a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 just got cancelled -- but not after spending 4 million dollars on preparation for it). It really depends on how involved the citizens of the city were in the decision.
Facts, even statistics, need not be dull; they are often just treated in a dull manner. If my tinfoil hat had shown up yet (still on back order), I'd say that They (insert whatever group you want) had planned it that way...having someone old, white, and monotonous talk about important things. They have someone young, hip, and beautiful talk about the entertaining, uninformative junk, and what do people watch?
I agree with you about Moore basically being entertaining propaganda (he's the liberal answer to Rush Limbaugh), but I should warn that saying "most voters have no attention span...are susceptible to propaganda...etc" is a very dangerous thing to say to oneself. If you listen to the people most would consider complete lunatics, at the far right and left of the political spectrum, you'll notice that one of the main credos of both sets are, "People are sheep. If they really thought about things and had the right facts presented to them, they'd be on my side. Too bad $OTHERSIDE, which owns the media and controls the government, has brainwashed them. It's up to me to present the facts they obviously missed, so they can put $MYGROUP in power." It apparently never occurs to such groups that people might not like their extreme ideas or think they're the right ones.
This type of thinking is elitism in one of its nastiest forms, could be (not sure yet) slowly spreading towards the mainstream, and is setting us toward a path of dictatorship, either by the left or right wing (both types of dictatorship are equally bad, I assure you). What other alternative is there to a dictatorship if the people's decisions or way of thinking are not respected?
Although I'm sure a lot of important information drops below the radar screen, oftentimes it's only unimportant to people because people prioritize based on how close the news is to them, not because they're incapable of making good decisions without being told what to do. The fellow poisoning dogs near their neighborhood and the nasty car accident last night get first priority. The guys in suits talking about the economic indicators in dreary voices get last. FOX is not popular because it distributes propaganda; it often doesn't mention politics at all. FOX is popular because it shows people what they are interested in and presents it in an interesting way. Convince people that your news hits them close to home or is worth thinking about, and you've convinced them that your news is worth listening to.
Long rant, I know, and somewhat off your topic, but I've been thinking about it a while and decided to try to formulate it. Feel free to disagree.
Don't have any; I've got great vision. But I had a co-worker for a while who got laser eye surgery. He was happy as hell; took a couple days off from work just to walk around and look at all the stuff he'd been missing.
That said, keep in mind that A. YMMV (usually said about software, not your fricking eyeballs! and B. No one knows what this'll do 20 years later.
I never did either, but that's because I was a GIF user (at the time of the controversy). Most software developers dumped it because Unisys started sending nasty legal letters to a lot of people, not because they were unreasonably paranoid.
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
It's YRO not because GIFs could violate your rights online, but because Unisys, the holder of a submarine patent on GIFs, could. That's one of the main reasons we switched to PNG. Now the patent expired, meaning our rights to use GIFs, without getting the pants sued off us, are back.
Please increase your clue level before posting. The article is correctly filed.
'Flash is a bad technology because it is abused by a few clueless web designers'
Really? There's another kind?
>ducks<
I've never understood the thinking that if life was found on another planet, all religious people's (they mean "Judeo-Christian and maybe Islamic", not "religious") heads would explode, and God Himself would vanish in a puff of logic. What's to stop God from creating life on another planet?
The idea that Earth was the center of the universe originated with some Greek philosophers (Aristotle and Ptolemy were among these), and the idea was actually quite controversial even then. The only reason why it became canonical (plenty of Christian scientists, including Johannes Kepler, argued against it) was that it was one of the few things left from the ruin of the ancient world by the time monastic scribes got hold of it, and the ancients were so impressive that it was hard to imagine anyone one-upping them at the time. Such a theory is never mentioned explicitly in the Bible, and it's pretty doubtful that any religious person would care about its collapse. Unless there are still Christians who believe that the orbit of any planet can be described by a perfect circle...
While quite conservative, I don't think it's that bad. Eventually the fake thugs (Slashdot is too kind; in my school, we called them wiggers) will have to get a job, where they (sometimes) learn to treat people with respect, or end up trapped in the MTV dreamworld once the fad wears off, derided by everyone in reality (mullets may have looked cool 20 years ago, but anyone still wearing one now gets a few snickers from any onlookers).
Teenagers have been affected by mindless consumer culture, which is what you are describing, ever since their existence was first admitted (late 50s or so). This current generation will grow out of it like all the rest did, and hopefully some of them will become a little older and wiser.
STANDARDS MAKE SENSE.
They do, but some standards are better than others. As my parents always said, "If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?"
Standards are intended to make things easier by making parts interchangable and machinery work in an expected way. This works fine for engineering, science, and a few other things, but certainly not for politics, and possibly not for economics. Nations are not interchangable parts; when you deal with a nation, you're really dealing with the people of that nation, with different values, goals, and beliefs. Standardizing machinery works well; standardizing mechanical standards works somewhat, depending on who goes along with it; standardizing people does not work well at all.
Mechanical standards such as GSM are not really being shot down by the US; they're being shot down by US companies who don't want to have to redo their infrastructure (which is understandable, although it sucks; they'll eventually have to fall in, now that AT&T is offering GSM). But then we come to political standards...
International Court of Justice - agreed way of trying cross border disputes and crimes against humanity... right again.
Ummm, wrong. There was a clear reason why we didn't ratify it; so every country that had a problem with us couldn't fill the court with frivolous lawsuits. Signing that treaty would have been like walking naked into a state prison with no cigarettes.
That'll only work until some honorable company's competitor sends spam in an attempt to get them in trouble with the law.
The real problem is technical (SMTP), and will remain technical; legislative attempts are doomed to failure because most of the worst spammers are criminals already; what's one law (treaty, not even law, in this case) more or less to break?
Shanghai Knights was horrible, maybe the tenth worst movie I have ever seen. Even putting Jackie Chan in it couldn't redeem it. I vowed never to watch another flick with Owen Wilson in it (a vow previously made regarding Adam Sandler, too).
Chris Tucker is bad, but Owen Wilson is far worse.
You can strike the "Longhorn resembles WindowMaker" part off your list. WindowMaker (along with AfterStep) was basically designed to provide the look 'n' feel of the NeXTStep desktop, IIRC.
It's very pretty and lightweight (I use it on a Toshiba Libretto with a 120MHz proc), but it's not original, and certainly doesn't derive much from the Unix philosophy.
When watching a movie like Fahrenheit 9/11 can make your blood boil, and still people don't do anything.
Umm...offtopic, but I still feel constrained to reply: Fahrenheit 9/11 is a "mockumentary". It is not real life. It is a carefully collected montage of video clips designed to preach to the choir. The people who listen to Michael Moore and Al Franken and take them seriously are no different than the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter; they're listening to what they want to hear.
There are a lot of good people to listen to on both sides of the fence, and you can usually find them because 1. They don't resort to childish insults and ad hominem attacks, and 2. They acknowledge the other side's viewpoint and might even agree with some points. Watching Fahrenheit 9/11 might get a chuckle out of some, but your blood isn't going to boil.
And actually, the fact that we have people whose blood will boil over an extremely biased presentation of exactly what they want to hear is the reason why we get such crummy elected officials. People thinking, "Well, he's basically the same as Bush...but...he's not Bush! He says so all the time! I'll vote for him!" or "He's crazy and he spends most of his time fellating the record industry...but at least he's a Republican! I'll vote for him!" will hurt us even worse in the years to come than they are already doing now.
The problem with waiting for the situation to get absurd (IMHO, it already has) is that yes, maybe the big companies will come to their senses...but it might be after a world of hurt has fallen on small innovators such as open source developers. As you say:
Eventually, doing anything even remotely fun, interesting, or productive will be so expensive that the system will crash and burn under it's own bloat.
Just as Disney proved by appeasing these nitwits, it will be much easier (for a while) for large companies to just pay the IP sharks off. What if that state of affairs lasts for ten, twenty years, with FOSS projects as well as any new small software business dropping right and left? I don't want to be forced to get a rich patron with 500 lawyers on call just in order to develop a small app.
I see your point, but this absurd-patent craze reminds me of the Soviet Union's experiment with communism. Yeah, it fizzled out after a while when the system became unusable, but there are a whole lot of East Europeans who wish it had fizzled out in 1917.
I wouldn't mind verbing so much if the right usage hadn't been drilled into me as a kid...but "verbing" the word "architect" is not a language advancement. It's a sloppy shortcut normally used in buzz-speak (that's why you almost never hear it in everyday English, but so often in computer- and business-related fields). It's ambiguous and makes English even more difficult to understand than it is already. The fact that enough people complained about it for this thread to occur shows that in fact, it is not "just a prescriptivist language maven" who hates this, but everyone who cringes when someone writes "effect" for "affect", or says "irregardlessly". Most verbing is the result of a current fad, and anyone who's over ten years old knows how fast most fad-generated words disappear.
To quote Bill Watterson (who, AFAIK, created the word "verbing" as "to make a noun into a verb"), "Verbing weirds things."
Your points are all perfectly valid. That's why I don't recommend Slackware to the casual user. If you want to see what this whole "compooter" thing is about, run SuSE, Fedora, or (zealots, please have mercy) Windows. :) If you want to have a fairly user-friendly system with minimal viruses and spyware, at low cost, run any of the first two. If you want to get your feet wet, try Knoppix; it doesn't require any drastic alterations to your current system since it's a LiveCD, and it's pretty usable.
If you're knowledgable about Linux, like a hands-on install where you get to manage your system without those pesky wizards and auto-generators getting in the way, don't mind BSD-style FS layouts, and don't expect everything to be handed to you...for God's sake do yourself a favor and run Slackware. You will thank me later.
I should mention that I define "later" as "after you manually install your drivers by looking up the names and opts in the kernel docs and uncommenting the requisite rc.modules entries in vi, exclude your PCMCIA IRQs 7 and 10 (your machine will lock up), call the Korean manufacturer of your monitor (your system is down, right? So you have no network) to figure out what to put in the XFree86Config, and add your SMB connector (missing by default) to your CUPS connector list...etc."
Why don't we put it another way? "Note that both people involved were guys. By its traditional discrimination against women (who more civilized) in favor of men (more aggressive and violent), IT is introducing a security risk since men will take more chances." It makes as much sense as the above "these damn' kids screw up all the time" rant (and before some /. feminist says "you go girl!", I should add that I'm male, 23, and consider both arguments completely idiotic).
IT is a younger field, therefore more IT guys are younger. Granted, it's been around for the last 40 years, but for about half of that time, you needed a lot of money to get a computer. The generation that got to use truly cheap computers came of age just ten years ago. It's natural that there is now an explosion of younger IT workers.
Marital, family, religious, and civic ties to society, IMHO, are much more likely to keep people honest than their age, even counting the fact that younger workers may be less experienced. And if you don't believe me, check a newspaper and see how many older, powerful men are at this moment headed to Club Fed because they weren't any better at ethics than the AOL dimwits mentioned in this article. Most of Congress is composed of older men, and I'd almost rather have Sanford Wallace (of Cyber Promotions infamy) representing me than some of these folks.
I work in a government agency, so I see a large proportion of older workers. Some are smart, hard workers; others are idiots. I see no larger proportion of idiots among younger people than I do among older ones, nor do I see any indication that the intelligence or ethics of the old have anything to do with the fact that they are old.
Since plenty of the spam relates back to overseas sources, you'll never see them spending time in a US jail. Simply enough, you'd never see every government in the world agreeing on enforcement of any law, even an anti-spam law. In a lot of countries, it's rather difficult to even report the spam. What happens when you're trying to report it, and the support people don't speak English. And don't be so egotistical to say "they should all speak English", the universe or even the Internet doesn't revolve around America.
As seen on a forum sig: "If it ain't English...it's gibberish." :)
The real problem in that arena is not lack of English skills (most of the computer-literate world can speak at least pidgin English, even if their messages sound like quotes from Zero Wing), but lack of desire to block spam. There exists a hatred of spam in the US and most European countries, but in third-world countries, it's often only looked at as a business opportunity.
That cultural difference is part of the problem...but foreign ISPs are just a drop in the bucket. The biggest source of spam is right here in America, in the form of computer users with too much broadband and no common sense. Hence Comcast's actions -- IMHO, a Good Thing judging from how much spam I get relayed through Comcast lusers.
The parent poster is perfectly correct. As everyone else's distro works harder and harder to out-bloat Windows, Slackware continues the original Linux ideal of a bloat-free, yet feature-rich, OS distro.
Part of MS's advantage is that it's run by a single set of libraries that get loaded in the OS at the start. They may not be good libraries, but they're ONE SET of libraries. Linux has plenty of good ones, but you need millions of them; every programmer of each individual app wants to reinvent the wheel or use something obscure, so memory use goes straight to the bad place. Users are forced to be smart about what they run, and Slackware definitely helps with that more than larger distros, which takes everything and the kitchen sink, and dumps it in the user's all-too-willing lap. "Sure, I'd like to install (?:G|K)Louse-Picker .0009a! Who knows, I might need it someday! Oh. I guess I need to install 300 dependencies...well Linux is always faster than M$, so I guess installing all those on my 300MHz 128MB Dell won't hurt it a bit!"
I don't feel much sympathy for all the RedHat refugees. If you want Windows, just get Windows. I know you won't be as hip then, but trust me, your personal computing experience will be better. Or buy a Mac; then you'll be even cooler than if you used Linux on a PC, if a little bit poverty-stricken.
IMHO, WindowMaker is the most beautiful WM one can use outside of Gnome/KDE. I ran Linux on my Toshiba Libretto, and WindowMaker was the obvious choice (since the Libretto has only 32Mb RAM and a 120MHz proc). The only one I've seen to even remotely compete with it in the lightweight class is AfterStep.
If somebody gets an old laptop and wants to run "just a word processor and a web browser" on it, WindowMaker is the way to go.
Probably a troll...but what the hell, I'll assume it's a real question...
But, to get back to the original point, I find it highly unnerving that the country that claims to be the world's foremost democracy holds democratic ideals in such low regard. If the majority of countries decides one thing, why does the US so often do the exact opposite?
Answer: Because we (I say "we" as in "Americans", since I'm one) are not citizens of the world, despite what progressives would like to think. We do not answer to a world government -- such a thing does not exist, although there's a club that we're members of called the UN, which has done things like electing the Sudan to the UN Human Rights Committee. We answer to the United States of America, and its Constitution is the final authority unless we decide to amend it (that's why they call it a free country).
There are many good reasons for this; for one thing, it means that pissants on the other side of the world don't get to tell us what to do. In fact, originally the law was set up to ensure that not even the folks in Washington, DC could tell us what to do in most cases. The federal government became more powerful over time, but every now and then states' rights get asserted (John Ashcroft getting rebuked by the courts for his attempt to shut down the Oregon assisted-suicide legalization is a prime, recent example).
The US was formed on the principle of self-determination, and that means that we do not have to accede to the rules of another country if they violate our laws (i.e. the Constitution). Which, judging from the article, is a good thing. Europeans are always giving Americans a hard time about how we're so corporate-friendly, but I don't see much difference myself; if anything, it seems like the EU and UK governments are trying to outdo us in bending over and grabbing the socks for the Arrr Aye Double A.