Yes yes, quite right. The fact that the things which would have caused a BSODs now simply reboot the machine when they happen means that we should all be thankful that MS has rid the world of this terrible scourge.
To be fair, when I use WinXP at work, the greatest instability is that whenever Windows Explorer (the file browser) or IE (required for another intranet I need to access) die, they take out the windows desktop and while it sort-of comes back, it'll keep dying if I open another file browser. It lets me save my work, but it doesn't count for long-term stability. But XP usually goes two weeks or so between this.
Ethanol has a lower energy density, true. But efficiency could refer to the percentage of that energy which is used. Perhaps you can get 70% efficient Ethanol engines versus 50% efficient gasoline engines.
But, the real issue is if Ethanol is more sustainable and has a smaller impact on the environment. Which fuel releases less CO^2 for a given ammount of energy. It's a given that Ethanol is more sustainable than fossil fuels.
The legality of keygens and cracks is gray, but leaning towards legal.
You are allowed to modify software that you own and despite the best efforts of the industry, you own the software you buy. Thus, cracks, which modify the software, are legal. Keygens also, as they do not involve sending people specific keys which may be protected, are legal. They are only software implementations of a formula.
The DMCA may say otherwise, but it's a crooked law best ignored, and more importantly, it only affects people in the USA.
Furthermore, this is completely ethical. If I pay you for software and you deliver a crippled product, I have a right to make it work. To say otherwise is ridiculous.
But, you don't agree to it by clicking through because there's nothing in it for you (no consideration).
You already paid for the software. The moment you leave the store you own it (not the copyright, but the right to use it fully, resell it, etc). They can't offer you the right to use it because you already have it. But, even if they offered you something in the EULA, it still wouldn't be valid because you must click through to use the software, something you own and have the right to use.
Also, because clicking through isn't optional (you must do it to use the software), it can't signify agreement. If they added a "I don't agree, but let me use the software" button then the "I Agree" button *might* be binding.
The courts are really very harsh on bogus contracts and this fits many criteria. In fact, it's almost extortion because they're withholding your legal right to use a product you own, to make you sign an exploitive contract...
Posting the Diebold memos violates the same law as posting _The Matrix_. Also, if the memos were in PDF form they might be nearly as big (well, maybe 20-50MB, certainly more than 10k or anything).
The solution is for people to actually be charged for barratry for threatening a lawsuit that has no technical merit. I mean, you should be able to take even just a cease and desist letter to court and get if the judge rules that they had could not have reasonably expected their case to prevail (because of lack of merit, not lack of funds), get a judgement against them.
Ideally you'd get either criminal penalties (jailtime for them and their lawyer who represented them for this spurious legal attack) or a huge cash settlement (based on a percentage of the threatening person/company's assets, in relation to their demands in relation to your assets. Threaten a poor person with $100M in spurious damages, watch your company get hit with a $50B lawsuit...)
Free speech is only free when people are allowed to say things you disagree with...
Technically, Diebold is claiming that the memo is copyrighted by them, despite the fact that this is not what copyright was intended for, and allowing this use of the DMCA would completely squash people's ability to whistle-blow.
I'd rather have a network that would allow any use, even something disgusting like kiddy porn or terrorist documents or whatever, as long as it let people speak out against injustice and post documents like these Diebold memos.
Are they providing protection against the "OCR the digital picture of your screen hole"?
Not to mention that there'll be a software solution to this in a week anyways, with a hacked video driver, or a small Office/Outlook crack to disable whatever copy-and-paste prevention they use.
Crap like this is just going to lead to complacent users who'll say more in email than before and who will be burned even more severely than they would have been.
Actually in Win95 and Win98 you not only had to reboot when changing your IP address (but not when DHCP got a new address, go figure) but simply going into the network control panel and pressing 'OK', with or without any changes, would ask for the CD and reload files. (Pressing cancel in the network settings, or just refusing to give it the CD did work.) I've worked in IT and tech support for years, this absolutely did happen.
Microsoft also makes it hard to download redistributable patches and upgrades. Not impossible, but all hidden in different places. For service packs you can search for redist and get the link, for Direct X it's in an inconvenient place on the page, under something about developers I think, and for IE, it's an easily missed check-box in the download stub which will tell it to download the full pack, instead of just what you need. Not impossible, and none of them are technically hidden, but pretty much as difficult as they could make it.
Microsoft isn't "controlling" mine or anybody else's deskop.
If you've missed all of MS's attempts to control not only their OS but everyone's applications, you've been sleeping since the late 80s. Their DRM is intrusive, their proposed DRM (Palladium) is worse, and they lie about the effectiveness of it. Yes, actual lies. Bill himself has been quoted as saying it'll stop viruses and worms, but this is untrue. Only executing signed code won't prevent buffer overflows in Outlook or IE, or either of them from simply letting scripts do more than they should.
There won't be a next Blaster because that server would either be behind a firewall or be patched months ahead of time like every other sane person was when the government warned them twice to.
If you blindly install MS's patches, you're a fool. They've very frequently broken third-party applications since the dos days ("Dos ain't done 'till Lotus don't run") and they continue to do so. Hell, they even break MS's own software every now and then. There's the Office bug that caused it to ask for your key over and over, for which MS proposed rolling the system date back by a year. There was the recent XP slowdown which caused many computers to take up to five minutes to boot and caused similar delays when you tried to do anything.
MS patches need intensive testing, especially in a large corporation, before they can be used on a production machine.
While the previous poster did hate MS (M$, etc) it wasn't entirely groundless. They have broken the law, lied in court, created upgrades that have intentionally sabotaged third-party applications, created what ammounts to spyware in the OS, and lied to the user about all of it. Not trustworthy at all.
If you believe that the source code leak is what delayed Half Life 2, you probably believe that all the losses written off to Sept 11, 2001 were actually due to the terrorist attack.
Did people get asked about their willingness to participate in Saddam's various killing sprees?
What you say sounds all nice and fluffy, with only the people whose lives would be at risk from the invasion getting a vote, but unfortunately it's simplistic and wrong. The people whose lives would be saved also get a vote. You can't simply draw a line around a small number of people and label them at risk from Saddam, and a small number and label them as potential casualties of war. As such, you can't poll the people involved. You simply have to weigh the sizes of the two groups and see which group is larger.
Haven't you read reports of and seen pictures of mass graves in Iraq? Haven't you heard of the guy who spent 10+ years in his parents attic after faking his death to avoid being tossed in jail and murdered? These weren't isolated cases, people were dying every day because of this, and vanishing so that their families had no idea if they were dead or alive.
Iraqi ex-patriots encourage this, they know what was going on and they want him removed. Presumably many have family there and they know the risks, but they still choose war. Many of them risked their lives fighting Saddam's regime, or simply leaving the country, and aren't asking people to face risks they themselves wouldn't.
Who said anything about shrugging off collateral damage? If someone was going to die, at least Saddam has been removed. If someone had to die, at least they died in the removing of a dictator. What's so hard to understand about that?
I don't expect anyone to line up for their turn to die, but if you're going to be asked to take the chance, wouldn't you want the reason to be worth it?
Oh fuck off you dipshit. If you're not going to read what I post, don't respond. I'm serious, you haven't contributed anything so far and it's unlikely to change.
I'd rather a 2% chance of losing a family member than a 6% chance. Do I have to have a family member murdered to have a valid opinion?
But those variables, x, y, and z, correspond fairly accurately to expected lifespan. Especially if x is number of sectors available for remapping errors, as a previous poster mentioned.
The days of selling things like HDs without them going through a burn-in are gone. It's so easy to build a self-test (and a fairly rigorous one) into the unit and to simply sort by the results.
Usually I find I can do a soft kill (ie, when each thread is done, exit it and spawn a new one with the new version of the program) so that no interruption is noticed.
Obviously if you're stopping networking to remove a driver module it'll take a bit longer, but usually only seconds.
Requiring iTunes vX.y to use iTunes network is pretty easy. I require Quake 3 to play a game of Quake 3. When it gets restrictive is when there's a website (you know - platform independent) that requires a specific browser, and a version of Media Player that not only does things I don't want, but includes features I actively distrust.
It'd be as if you needed IE6 to play Quake3, and not for a real requirement, but because the install program insisted on popping up the release notes in it, or something else silly.
I think he means, if only all the machines were identical and had the same software installed. Also, what about citrix and Lotus Notes which have been hosed by some patches? You can't just blindly install or you might end up sending everyone home the next day as you roll back and fix broken machines.
Do you know that the patch *only* messes with dcom? Even if you can't make sense out of a Linux patch you can check out various news sites where professionals who can read them, and aren't affiliated with the patchers, will tell you their opinion of the fixes. Often for things like an SSH exploit someone will come out with a really trivial iptables way to block it, or an SSH patch that fixes the bug but only in a band-aid way, and the news sites discuss it as such. Then a few hours later the developers release an alpha version of a better patch, and the next day they release the final - usually the alpha after more testing.
With a Microsoft patch you don't get any independent analysis of the fix, you don't get to choose an immediate fix, versus a firewall rule, etc. In fact, MS doesn't even guarantee what the patch does, they simply say "To fix X, install Y", you have to hope they didn't patch anything else at the same time. (They are getting better at releasing single-issue patches, but you still have to blindly trust them.)
Also, you call a network precarious because a 500k dcom patch would bring it down. If that network exists to run a dcom-using service, a patch that does the wrong thing will bring it down. Much like firewalling off a single port (80 for instance) would bring down your "precarious" website, from the POV of customers.
Even more subtle, firewalling everything but 80 might stop the commerce too. If you rely on HTTPS on the default port, everything but the secure pages would work. It'd look right with a trivial test but would break in a more subtle way.
It's not the fault of the admin that bad patches take out networks. You simply can't blindly trust patches, you must examine them (even indirectly) and test them.
If someone could wipe out MS financially, or some other company (SCO?) that was essentially trying to destroy open source, would that not help the Linux community by removing a threat?
Microsoft has tried to get the US government to avoid using open source software, saying that it's communist. If they succeed they'll put a bunch of people out of work, people who have as much right to earn a living as Microsoft does. Would somehow destroying MS not be a reasonable response to this attack? If you can't afford to bribe politicians like Bill does, you're forced to use other methods.
SCO is similarly setting out to destroy open source. If they manage to bill anyone they won't stop till they bill everyone, making Linux more expensive than a proprietary solution and removing the liberty aspect as well. If you could somehow cause their stock to tank overnight, destroying their profit motive, wouldn't this be fair?
It's plainly obvious that SCO is lying. If they have any case, it's a contract case with IBM and even a first-year law student could tell them it would *never* allow them to bill end users. They're claiming direct and malicious copying and yet the "proof" they show is obviously false, but it's easy to see how it would account for the rest of the infractions they claim.
If my revenue is based on working with Linux, aren't I as justified in destroying the entity known as SCO as they are in destroying me? If they aren't evil, why would I be? If they are evil, step in and stop them, don't encourage people to invest in them.
Ahh yes, because you couldn't simply shoot uncounted people. They need to be tallied with a supercomputer, then shot.
I'm know IBM supplied the Nazis with computers, and that the Nazis used them for this purpose, but I think the Nazis would have done it anyway even if they'd had to have clerks with clipboards do the accounting.
I recently found an email I wrote to a friend about five months before the Sept-11th attack where I was talking about the Taliban and we were discussing their crimes. Remember, that's when the woman was sentenced to death for being raped, and when they were destroying the Buddha statues, etc. Their solution to stop rape was to make the rapist marry his victim, so it wasn't rape. They regularly killed people who disagreed with them and women were treated intolerably. This was being carried by a wide spectrum of media outlets.
Are they living in a paradise now? No, but at least the religious freaks are gone. The warlords are all seperate and fight each other, at least their power could be broken. The Canadians and other peacekeepers are there trying to make the country actually safe. Are some women killed? Yeah, but not as many as before. And at least the "law" of the land isn't that women are posessions, whose murder is okay as long as it's done with an excuse from the Koran.
Much the same with Iraq, Saddam's crimes were clearly documented by British media. No Iraqi I'd ever talked to (two, about this issue) or seen or TV (from outside Iraq) ever said *anything* positive about Saddam. They all said he was a horrible dictator and that nobody in Iraq felt safe if they didn't agree with him. He ruled with the proverbial iron fist and would have been almost impossible to remove from inside. Once he's gone there are others but they haven't consolidated power and aren't are much of a threat. There's no way everyone would vote a dictator in again, given a real choice.
Perhaps the "gassing" of the kurds didn't happen as intentionally as it was supposed to have but he definately did intend them harm as the ongoing battles with them showed. (I'm sure they hated him too, but he's the one with the standing army.)
Showing that Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, are all nasty countries ruled by assholes doesn't disprove that Afghanistan and Iraq were. The world would be a better place if those countries were walled off. A thousand years ago they were a civilization, now they're a cesspool of murderous religion and sexism. The lucky ones will be liberated, the unlucky ones will keep those systems until they self destruct.
Do you have no concept of what a better life is? Thousands of Iraqis would have died because of the crimes of the government. Life would be worse for everyone because that situation wasn't going to go away on its own.
Have you ever heard an Iraqi living outside of Iraq say anything positive about Saddam? All of them that I've heard, in the US and in other countries, have said that he's a dangerous cruel man and is oppressing the country.
Sure, it sucks to be dead, but people were dying anyways. Better that the killer be removed, even if a few people die during his struggles. At least he can't go on killing all the dissidents.
Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying. Dubya's a weasel and the appropriate thing isn't to say "But Clinton's a weasel too". It's not good enough that the "other side"'s politicians are asses as well, you have to admit that yours are, and only then can you make an attempt to get better ones.
That definition of weasel isn't standard. It would call a cat burglar a weasel simply because they sneak which isn't what an average person would say.
Weasel is assumed to mean saying one thing while doing another, habitually. Not stopping when called on the lie. It also generally implies that they claim they're telling the truth at every step.
As such, Saddam's crimes that, imho, deserve overthrowing him weren't WoMD, but his gassing of the kurds, the secret police and mass graves of dissidents, etc. He openly did all of that. I mean, he didn't advertise, but he didn't bother lying about it all the time, inventing excuses and so forth.
Bush, while doing something I support in a way (deposing Saddam, kicking religious idiots out of control of Afghanistan, etc) is a weasel because he doesn't just say "These guys are killing thousands of innocents and show no signs of stopping". He completely ignores that and makes up bullshit stories about terrorists, despite that having been disproven time and again.
Isn't the USA doing exactly the same thing, but at 40 hours? Past that I get mandatory overtime (mandated by the government) so my company rarely asks me to work those hours. Doesn't this seriously impare our ability to compete with the Chinese who will lock workers in factories for 14+ hour days?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes yes, quite right. The fact that the things which would have caused a BSODs now simply reboot the machine when they happen means that we should all be thankful that MS has rid the world of this terrible scourge.
To be fair, when I use WinXP at work, the greatest instability is that whenever Windows Explorer (the file browser) or IE (required for another intranet I need to access) die, they take out the windows desktop and while it sort-of comes back, it'll keep dying if I open another file browser. It lets me save my work, but it doesn't count for long-term stability. But XP usually goes two weeks or so between this.
Ethanol has a lower energy density, true. But efficiency could refer to the percentage of that energy which is used. Perhaps you can get 70% efficient Ethanol engines versus 50% efficient gasoline engines.
But, the real issue is if Ethanol is more sustainable and has a smaller impact on the environment. Which fuel releases less CO^2 for a given ammount of energy. It's a given that Ethanol is more sustainable than fossil fuels.
Efficiency can be seen in a long-term sense.
The legality of keygens and cracks is gray, but leaning towards legal.
You are allowed to modify software that you own and despite the best efforts of the industry, you own the software you buy. Thus, cracks, which modify the software, are legal. Keygens also, as they do not involve sending people specific keys which may be protected, are legal. They are only software implementations of a formula.
The DMCA may say otherwise, but it's a crooked law best ignored, and more importantly, it only affects people in the USA.
Furthermore, this is completely ethical. If I pay you for software and you deliver a crippled product, I have a right to make it work. To say otherwise is ridiculous.
But, you don't agree to it by clicking through because there's nothing in it for you (no consideration).
You already paid for the software. The moment you leave the store you own it (not the copyright, but the right to use it fully, resell it, etc). They can't offer you the right to use it because you already have it. But, even if they offered you something in the EULA, it still wouldn't be valid because you must click through to use the software, something you own and have the right to use.
Also, because clicking through isn't optional (you must do it to use the software), it can't signify agreement. If they added a "I don't agree, but let me use the software" button then the "I Agree" button *might* be binding.
The courts are really very harsh on bogus contracts and this fits many criteria. In fact, it's almost extortion because they're withholding your legal right to use a product you own, to make you sign an exploitive contract...
Posting the Diebold memos violates the same law as posting _The Matrix_. Also, if the memos were in PDF form they might be nearly as big (well, maybe 20-50MB, certainly more than 10k or anything).
How do you stop one and not stop the other?
The solution is for people to actually be charged for barratry for threatening a lawsuit that has no technical merit. I mean, you should be able to take even just a cease and desist letter to court and get if the judge rules that they had could not have reasonably expected their case to prevail (because of lack of merit, not lack of funds), get a judgement against them.
Ideally you'd get either criminal penalties (jailtime for them and their lawyer who represented them for this spurious legal attack) or a huge cash settlement (based on a percentage of the threatening person/company's assets, in relation to their demands in relation to your assets. Threaten a poor person with $100M in spurious damages, watch your company get hit with a $50B lawsuit...)
Free speech is only free when people are allowed to say things you disagree with...
Technically, Diebold is claiming that the memo is copyrighted by them, despite the fact that this is not what copyright was intended for, and allowing this use of the DMCA would completely squash people's ability to whistle-blow.
I'd rather have a network that would allow any use, even something disgusting like kiddy porn or terrorist documents or whatever, as long as it let people speak out against injustice and post documents like these Diebold memos.
Are they providing protection against the "OCR the digital picture of your screen hole"?
Not to mention that there'll be a software solution to this in a week anyways, with a hacked video driver, or a small Office/Outlook crack to disable whatever copy-and-paste prevention they use.
Crap like this is just going to lead to complacent users who'll say more in email than before and who will be burned even more severely than they would have been.
Actually in Win95 and Win98 you not only had to reboot when changing your IP address (but not when DHCP got a new address, go figure) but simply going into the network control panel and pressing 'OK', with or without any changes, would ask for the CD and reload files. (Pressing cancel in the network settings, or just refusing to give it the CD did work.) I've worked in IT and tech support for years, this absolutely did happen.
Microsoft also makes it hard to download redistributable patches and upgrades. Not impossible, but all hidden in different places. For service packs you can search for redist and get the link, for Direct X it's in an inconvenient place on the page, under something about developers I think, and for IE, it's an easily missed check-box in the download stub which will tell it to download the full pack, instead of just what you need. Not impossible, and none of them are technically hidden, but pretty much as difficult as they could make it.
Microsoft isn't "controlling" mine or anybody else's deskop.
If you've missed all of MS's attempts to control not only their OS but everyone's applications, you've been sleeping since the late 80s. Their DRM is intrusive, their proposed DRM (Palladium) is worse, and they lie about the effectiveness of it. Yes, actual lies. Bill himself has been quoted as saying it'll stop viruses and worms, but this is untrue. Only executing signed code won't prevent buffer overflows in Outlook or IE, or either of them from simply letting scripts do more than they should.
There won't be a next Blaster because that server would either be behind a firewall or be patched months ahead of time like every other sane person was when the government warned them twice to.
If you blindly install MS's patches, you're a fool. They've very frequently broken third-party applications since the dos days ("Dos ain't done 'till Lotus don't run") and they continue to do so. Hell, they even break MS's own software every now and then. There's the Office bug that caused it to ask for your key over and over, for which MS proposed rolling the system date back by a year. There was the recent XP slowdown which caused many computers to take up to five minutes to boot and caused similar delays when you tried to do anything.
MS patches need intensive testing, especially in a large corporation, before they can be used on a production machine.
While the previous poster did hate MS (M$, etc) it wasn't entirely groundless. They have broken the law, lied in court, created upgrades that have intentionally sabotaged third-party applications, created what ammounts to spyware in the OS, and lied to the user about all of it. Not trustworthy at all.
If you believe that the source code leak is what delayed Half Life 2, you probably believe that all the losses written off to Sept 11, 2001 were actually due to the terrorist attack.
Did people get asked about their willingness to participate in Saddam's various killing sprees?
What you say sounds all nice and fluffy, with only the people whose lives would be at risk from the invasion getting a vote, but unfortunately it's simplistic and wrong. The people whose lives would be saved also get a vote. You can't simply draw a line around a small number of people and label them at risk from Saddam, and a small number and label them as potential casualties of war. As such, you can't poll the people involved. You simply have to weigh the sizes of the two groups and see which group is larger.
Haven't you read reports of and seen pictures of mass graves in Iraq? Haven't you heard of the guy who spent 10+ years in his parents attic after faking his death to avoid being tossed in jail and murdered? These weren't isolated cases, people were dying every day because of this, and vanishing so that their families had no idea if they were dead or alive.
Iraqi ex-patriots encourage this, they know what was going on and they want him removed. Presumably many have family there and they know the risks, but they still choose war. Many of them risked their lives fighting Saddam's regime, or simply leaving the country, and aren't asking people to face risks they themselves wouldn't.
Who said anything about shrugging off collateral damage? If someone was going to die, at least Saddam has been removed. If someone had to die, at least they died in the removing of a dictator. What's so hard to understand about that?
I don't expect anyone to line up for their turn to die, but if you're going to be asked to take the chance, wouldn't you want the reason to be worth it?
Oh fuck off you dipshit. If you're not going to read what I post, don't respond. I'm serious, you haven't contributed anything so far and it's unlikely to change.
I'd rather a 2% chance of losing a family member than a 6% chance. Do I have to have a family member murdered to have a valid opinion?
But those variables, x, y, and z, correspond fairly accurately to expected lifespan. Especially if x is number of sectors available for remapping errors, as a previous poster mentioned.
The days of selling things like HDs without them going through a burn-in are gone. It's so easy to build a self-test (and a fairly rigorous one) into the unit and to simply sort by the results.
Usually I find I can do a soft kill (ie, when each thread is done, exit it and spawn a new one with the new version of the program) so that no interruption is noticed.
Obviously if you're stopping networking to remove a driver module it'll take a bit longer, but usually only seconds.
Requiring iTunes vX.y to use iTunes network is pretty easy. I require Quake 3 to play a game of Quake 3. When it gets restrictive is when there's a website (you know - platform independent) that requires a specific browser, and a version of Media Player that not only does things I don't want, but includes features I actively distrust.
It'd be as if you needed IE6 to play Quake3, and not for a real requirement, but because the install program insisted on popping up the release notes in it, or something else silly.
I think he means, if only all the machines were identical and had the same software installed. Also, what about citrix and Lotus Notes which have been hosed by some patches? You can't just blindly install or you might end up sending everyone home the next day as you roll back and fix broken machines.
Do you know that the patch *only* messes with dcom? Even if you can't make sense out of a Linux patch you can check out various news sites where professionals who can read them, and aren't affiliated with the patchers, will tell you their opinion of the fixes. Often for things like an SSH exploit someone will come out with a really trivial iptables way to block it, or an SSH patch that fixes the bug but only in a band-aid way, and the news sites discuss it as such. Then a few hours later the developers release an alpha version of a better patch, and the next day they release the final - usually the alpha after more testing.
With a Microsoft patch you don't get any independent analysis of the fix, you don't get to choose an immediate fix, versus a firewall rule, etc. In fact, MS doesn't even guarantee what the patch does, they simply say "To fix X, install Y", you have to hope they didn't patch anything else at the same time. (They are getting better at releasing single-issue patches, but you still have to blindly trust them.)
Also, you call a network precarious because a 500k dcom patch would bring it down. If that network exists to run a dcom-using service, a patch that does the wrong thing will bring it down. Much like firewalling off a single port (80 for instance) would bring down your "precarious" website, from the POV of customers.
Even more subtle, firewalling everything but 80 might stop the commerce too. If you rely on HTTPS on the default port, everything but the secure pages would work. It'd look right with a trivial test but would break in a more subtle way.
It's not the fault of the admin that bad patches take out networks. You simply can't blindly trust patches, you must examine them (even indirectly) and test them.
If someone could wipe out MS financially, or some other company (SCO?) that was essentially trying to destroy open source, would that not help the Linux community by removing a threat?
Microsoft has tried to get the US government to avoid using open source software, saying that it's communist. If they succeed they'll put a bunch of people out of work, people who have as much right to earn a living as Microsoft does. Would somehow destroying MS not be a reasonable response to this attack? If you can't afford to bribe politicians like Bill does, you're forced to use other methods.
SCO is similarly setting out to destroy open source. If they manage to bill anyone they won't stop till they bill everyone, making Linux more expensive than a proprietary solution and removing the liberty aspect as well. If you could somehow cause their stock to tank overnight, destroying their profit motive, wouldn't this be fair?
It's plainly obvious that SCO is lying. If they have any case, it's a contract case with IBM and even a first-year law student could tell them it would *never* allow them to bill end users. They're claiming direct and malicious copying and yet the "proof" they show is obviously false, but it's easy to see how it would account for the rest of the infractions they claim.
If my revenue is based on working with Linux, aren't I as justified in destroying the entity known as SCO as they are in destroying me? If they aren't evil, why would I be? If they are evil, step in and stop them, don't encourage people to invest in them.
Ahh yes, because you couldn't simply shoot uncounted people. They need to be tallied with a supercomputer, then shot.
I'm know IBM supplied the Nazis with computers, and that the Nazis used them for this purpose, but I think the Nazis would have done it anyway even if they'd had to have clerks with clipboards do the accounting.
Bullshit.
I recently found an email I wrote to a friend about five months before the Sept-11th attack where I was talking about the Taliban and we were discussing their crimes. Remember, that's when the woman was sentenced to death for being raped, and when they were destroying the Buddha statues, etc. Their solution to stop rape was to make the rapist marry his victim, so it wasn't rape. They regularly killed people who disagreed with them and women were treated intolerably. This was being carried by a wide spectrum of media outlets.
Are they living in a paradise now? No, but at least the religious freaks are gone. The warlords are all seperate and fight each other, at least their power could be broken. The Canadians and other peacekeepers are there trying to make the country actually safe. Are some women killed? Yeah, but not as many as before. And at least the "law" of the land isn't that women are posessions, whose murder is okay as long as it's done with an excuse from the Koran.
Much the same with Iraq, Saddam's crimes were clearly documented by British media. No Iraqi I'd ever talked to (two, about this issue) or seen or TV (from outside Iraq) ever said *anything* positive about Saddam. They all said he was a horrible dictator and that nobody in Iraq felt safe if they didn't agree with him. He ruled with the proverbial iron fist and would have been almost impossible to remove from inside. Once he's gone there are others but they haven't consolidated power and aren't are much of a threat. There's no way everyone would vote a dictator in again, given a real choice.
Perhaps the "gassing" of the kurds didn't happen as intentionally as it was supposed to have but he definately did intend them harm as the ongoing battles with them showed. (I'm sure they hated him too, but he's the one with the standing army.)
Showing that Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, are all nasty countries ruled by assholes doesn't disprove that Afghanistan and Iraq were. The world would be a better place if those countries were walled off. A thousand years ago they were a civilization, now they're a cesspool of murderous religion and sexism. The lucky ones will be liberated, the unlucky ones will keep those systems until they self destruct.
Do you have no concept of what a better life is? Thousands of Iraqis would have died because of the crimes of the government. Life would be worse for everyone because that situation wasn't going to go away on its own.
Have you ever heard an Iraqi living outside of Iraq say anything positive about Saddam? All of them that I've heard, in the US and in other countries, have said that he's a dangerous cruel man and is oppressing the country.
Sure, it sucks to be dead, but people were dying anyways. Better that the killer be removed, even if a few people die during his struggles. At least he can't go on killing all the dissidents.
Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying. Dubya's a weasel and the appropriate thing isn't to say "But Clinton's a weasel too". It's not good enough that the "other side"'s politicians are asses as well, you have to admit that yours are, and only then can you make an attempt to get better ones.
That definition of weasel isn't standard. It would call a cat burglar a weasel simply because they sneak which isn't what an average person would say.
Weasel is assumed to mean saying one thing while doing another, habitually. Not stopping when called on the lie. It also generally implies that they claim they're telling the truth at every step.
As such, Saddam's crimes that, imho, deserve overthrowing him weren't WoMD, but his gassing of the kurds, the secret police and mass graves of dissidents, etc. He openly did all of that. I mean, he didn't advertise, but he didn't bother lying about it all the time, inventing excuses and so forth.
Bush, while doing something I support in a way (deposing Saddam, kicking religious idiots out of control of Afghanistan, etc) is a weasel because he doesn't just say "These guys are killing thousands of innocents and show no signs of stopping". He completely ignores that and makes up bullshit stories about terrorists, despite that having been disproven time and again.
Isn't the USA doing exactly the same thing, but at 40 hours? Past that I get mandatory overtime (mandated by the government) so my company rarely asks me to work those hours. Doesn't this seriously impare our ability to compete with the Chinese who will lock workers in factories for 14+ hour days?