I don't think I'd like to see online voting in national US elections, at least not yet. My main problem with it is that it's possible that whoever is running the servers for where you vote had absolutely no idea what they were doing. In that case, they are prone to attacks. Even if they are getting simple DoS attacks, it may prevent a lot of people from voting. It's really hard to DoS a physical poll location.
Just think what could happen if a certain troublemaking group got all of their members to vote at a certain time (say, they got everyone to vote within an hour-long window), and the rest of the time, they were DoSing the servers. That could have dramatic effects.
I do think that online voting could get a lot more people out voting, as it would only be a 5-minute job, whereas physically going to a poll location, standing in line, etc., could take quite a while.
Regardless, I think this year will have a higher number of people out there voting. However, it's hard to know how things will go. There does appear to be a broader field this year in the Presidential race, which I believe will increase interest. (to be fair, I'll go alphabetically;-) Browne, Buchanan, Bush, Gore, Hagelin and Nader are all getting at least some coverage (though I've seen the least for Browne), though I'm not sure who's on the ballots (that varies state-to-state).
Hmm.. I should ask -- does anyone have good information about how the Electoral College all works? I know that there are 535 votes in it, but how do those votes get made? Is it just a single person's choice, or do they choices get made by seeing the popular vote in a particular area? Does it vary from state-to-state? -- Ski-U-Mah!
I work at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management as a Solaris and Linux (and occasionally NeXT(!)) administrator. The strange thing about this building is that about a third of the rooms in this building are `sponsored' by somebody. Some of these sponsored rooms are just offices! Each one has a plaque above it saying that somebody helped pay for it.
Some day, I've got to go around and count how many plaques there are... There are a lot of them..
Also, UMN has a contract with Coca-Cola for their beverages. Even the water used at many sporting events comes from Coke (Dasani is a Coca-Cola product). -- Ski-U-Mah!
``Miguel also should have picked a better title. "Unix sucks" is *not* going to get the mainstream to read the article, they're too used to one-line sound bytes''
``Unix Sucks'' was not the title! The title was ``Let's make UNIX Not Suck''. I don't think there really could have been a better title. -- Ski-U-Mah!
You're right. Back when I ran PC DOS 7.0, it was a very good DOS. They put a lot of effort into giving as much free memory in the lower 640kB as possible, which was nice. IIRC, I was running with over 600kB free when sitting at a prompt. I didn't run all sorts of fancy things, but it had Doskey, the CD-ROM drivers, mouse, and maybe another thing or two (it's been quite a while).
Hmm.. Looks like it sells for $50-60. A tad spendy, but not too bad (I think they actually include an AntiVirus package, and it also comes with the REXX scripting language). -- Ski-U-Mah!
I just realized that many Java compilers and utilities for Windows run from the command line. This isn't the end of the world (you could probably make some batch files or something, or have they disappeared too?), but it may cause difficulty..
Oh well, for those that just need a command line, there will always be one, be it Bash or something like OS/2's and WinNT's CMD.EXE. -- Ski-U-Mah!
Hey guys.. If you want a DOS prompt, why don't you just make a new command interpreter? Also, you can probably still run Bash in WinMe (though I know that Bash on Win32 is horiffically slow..).
Now, for the more interesting problem of 16-bit DOS, effort should be put into the FreeDOS project.
I know WinMe is going to cause trouble. There are a *lot* of devices out there that need bios upgrades, this, that, and the other thing, which are currently only currently possible through DOS. I had to upgrade my BIOS last night, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to boot into DOS, since I didn't have any disks with it. My roommate did have a 98 boot disk, though he runs Win2k these days. -- Ski-U-Mah!
I'm surprised I haven't seen it mentioned yet (it seems so obvious), but didn't having GWB pontificating from a remote location and displaying it only on bigscreens seem a lot like the Big Brother stuff we've seen before? I mean, I guess it wasn't just focused on his head, but... -- Ski-U-Mah!
I don't like the choices that are being presented to us by the two primary parties in this country. I'm much more interested in Ralph Nader and the Green party this year. I had been hoping that they would be getting more attention, but the (national) media is still focusing entirely on the Republicans and Democrats.
Nader did get a good reception here in MN when he was here a few weeks ago. He even showed up on Almanac, the local weekly PBS political show.
Certainly, Nader does not completely align himself politically with Ventura, but they are probably closer to what the people want and need than either the RNC or DNC can give the People. -- Ski-U-Mah!
``...so it should theoretically work with any monitor that supports 1280x1024.''
Whoops.. If you have a fixed-freq monitor, this probably won't work, but it should work for any multisync monitor. I came up with this because my monitor is only spec'd to do 1280x1024, and I didn't want to try my luck at a higher resolution (which would have probably forced me to use lower refresh rates). -- Ski-U-Mah!
Okay, so it isn't a nice multiple of good numbers, but here's the resolution I've come up with: 1320x992. The number of pixels on the screen is within approximately 0.1% of 1280x1024, so it should theoretically work with any monitor that supports 1280x1024.
I have pasted a few modelines below. The most important number for a lot of people is the dotclock (120 in the example). You can bring that down or up, depending upon how high of refresh rates you can use with your system. IIRC, this runs at about 60 Hz, but it may be a bit higher (65 or so). Please also realize that xvidtune may be of use.
Also note that I'm not a genius when it comes to this stuff, and it could cause bad things to happen (though most modern displays can shut off when fed a bad signal..)
``...play with it a little and you'll never use telnet and FTP again''
Of course, people forget about their mail a lot. Here at UMN, our central mail servers run stunnel, so you can read your POP3 or IMAP mail over an SSL tunnel. Before I found out that they were doing this, I was really bothered by how many people could be sniffing my password. I had tried usin SSH tunnels, but that required you to stay logged in.
New versions of Netscape Communicator do support SSL, and I believe recent versions of mutt do too. -- Ski-U-Mah!
Whoops.. I see from reading some of the other comments that the Evolution guys plan to support a reasonable number of other protocols. Things will move more smoothly, of course, if the protocols are open. Someone mentioned that this may be easy for Notes. I believe that the protocols used by the Pegasus mail suite are also open. (The server costs, and the clients are gratis). -- Ski-U-Mah!
Unfortunately, there are organizations that disable POP/IMAP/SMTP functionality (well, I know that IBM, for instance, doesn't run POP or IMAP on their Notes servers). What should people in such organizations do? I suppose someone could make an intermediary program to translate between protocols, such as POP<->Notes or IMAP<->Exchange, but that requires Yet Another Dæmon running on your system.. -- Ski-U-Mah!
Perhaps it would be a good idea for IBM/Lotus to look into helping these guys out. There are a lot of people (including me) who get mail through Lotus Notes. (actually, I've set up a forwarding address, so the Notes server sends mail to Sendmail on my box. No retrieval necessary..)
Anyway, even at IBM, there are a lot of people on AIX or Linux who need to run some sort of VNC-ish program to access mail through an NT box running somewhere deep inside the building.
In Evolution 0.2, I couldn't find a way to view the headers (and I didn't see anything in the 0.3 announcement). Of course, it's got that open-sourceness thing going for it, so if it's not a feature by, say, 0.5, I'll put it in myself..
I was really impressed with 0.2 (though I never got it to compile..). I just hope some packages pop up soon on helix-update.. -- Ski-U-Mah!
With these huge corporations that are in existence today, it is very hard to go through with a complete boycott. For example, many of us know and love Sony for making high-quality audio, video, and computer hardware. Sony also has a presence in the music and movie industries. Should I not buy that Trinitron display I've been lusting after because I don't like how their music division is behaving? That's a personal decision.
With a company like Disney, it gets even worse, as a number of good television programs run on ABC. I prefer to watch ABC News rather than the others (I don't want to have much to do with NBC because of their closeness with Microsoft, and I just don't like CBS News..:-p )
The 2600 crew has noticed that few people want to report on their DeCSS case. I've heard Emmanuel say on his radio show that he's had reporters call him up and ask about other topics. He'd politely answer questions, but at the same time would point out that that reporter's organization was on `the other side' in the DeCSS trial. Mostly, he just gets a shrug and some response to the effect of `well, I don't choose the stories..'
Of course, I think you were thinking about movies, and only movies. Personally, I really enjoy a good movie. It provides a good escape, where your mind can unwind for an hour or two. There are a lot of movies that really suck, and I personally have been going to fewer movies since the DeCSS thing started, though I still go. I try to only go to the `good' movies, the ones I'll really enjoy.
It is extremely difficult to avoid the products of companies involved here. It's relatively easy to avoid Microsoft. With these big media companies, they're all around you. They may even own your local newspapers or television stations.
Perhaps that's even more of a reason to go through with a boycott.. -- Ski-U-Mah!
If at all possible, I'd recommend getting some 64-bit hardware. Probably an Alpha-based system. Next, get a decent filesystem like ReiserFS or Global Filesystem.
If you are running on x86 hardware, there's not telling if the accesses will be capable of reading large files (>2GB). -- Ski-U-Mah!
Well, X may not be the best thing out there (in fact, it pretty much sucks for a lot of things..) I've heard about things like Display Postscript and NeWS, and perhaps development should be refocused on rebuilding them and similar projects.
There is a Display Ghostscript project, and many people have heard about the Berlin project. I've watched Berlin a bit, and I'm not sure it's going in a direction I like (they seem to only want one widget toolkit, which is both good and bad).
Obviously, for any of these projects to take off as projects independent of X (right now, they are often used as a layer on top of X), framebuffer support in the Linux kernel must be improved. Therefore, before we go off trying to re-write the world, a good foundation of security and stability must be built into the kernel.
I know many people don't like the idea of having graphics in the kernel, though this can be worked around by having modules that merely open a pathway to the video registers and memory and grant you safe access to the hardware (i.e., no more suid-root graphics systems).
Blah, I'm beginning to ramble (plus I really need to get some work done...) -- Ski-U-Mah! Stop the MPAA
Something you may not know about monitors is that having a really big (CRT) screen doesn't necessarily give you the best experience. I was looking at some big Sonys (I probably won't buy one.. I don't think I'll pull in enough cash this summer) and I noticed that the huge 21" displays run at around 96dpi (even at 2048x1536 resolution). However, the monitor I have right now (15", probably about 14" viewable) runs at 1320x992 and has a dpi of about 118. This means that my display can give me crisper text (though I can't fit as much of it on the same size display).
Just out of curiosity, has much effort been put into vector displays in the past decade or so? I presume work has been done (probably for CAD shops..), but they are vastly outnumbered by raster displays.. Also, I suppose it would be (theoretically) possible to convert an ordinary raster display into a vector display, but I have only a small understanding of what goes into a CRT display.. (and there would probably be deficiencies, like you might only be able to display in one color or something..) -- Ski-U-Mah! Stop the MPAA
Perhaps this feature could be used to do things like change the phone to ring in vibrate mode, turn down the ringer volume, or something like that. Preferably, this would all be user-configurable, of course.. -- Ski-U-Mah! Stop the MPAA
Yes, this is a problem. The University of Minnesota nearly adopted a no-SYNs policy for the residence halls, where all SYN packets would be blocked. Fortunately, there was a group of individuals who noticed that there were many `legal' services that would break. Identd would be broken, preventing many people from using IRC. Any sort of net phone software would probably stop working (unless they used UDP or something). Even ICQ would have probably stopped working. The staff at UMN is pretty smart, and it's pretty surprising that they even suggested doing that...
Anyway, I am getting concerned about cable and DSL companies that want to take similar policies. I know that many companies scan their subscribers' computers looking for anything remotely troublesome. You could probably get your connection shut off for even having identd listening on an FTP port, even if in.ftpd or whatever is not installed on your system.
I know that bandwidth is an issue, but it will always be an issue.. I think you could justifiably block a service for a certain amount of time, until your bandwidth supply is enhanced, but they should always be temporary things.
Of course, one thing that my family's cable provider (@home) does is limit upstream bandwidth to some pretty low numbers. I think it's sitting at 112kbps right now. Certainly, that's still a pretty good speed, but it does have an impact... -- Ski-U-Mah! Stop the MPAA
IMO, the GPL is slightly less `real' than most other shrink-wrap licenses (and that's really what the GPL is, in most cases. Of course, the GPL only goes into effect when you use or modify the software, not just when you open the `box'..). You (usually) don't click any `accept' button before installing the software. Certainly, the GPL comes with your software, but you usually don't get prompted to accept or reject it.
Where this gets interesting is in the area of DVDs. The movie industry expects consumers to use licensed players to play those movies. However, there is no contract of any sort with the consumer stating that they are required to do so. So, if the worst happens, and the GPL is struck down, we at least know that the DVD industry is way out of line by trying to enforce invisible contracts.. -- Ski-U-Mah! Stop the MPAA
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I'd like to see online voting in national US elections, at least not yet. My main problem with it is that it's possible that whoever is running the servers for where you vote had absolutely no idea what they were doing. In that case, they are prone to attacks. Even if they are getting simple DoS attacks, it may prevent a lot of people from voting. It's really hard to DoS a physical poll location.
;-) Browne, Buchanan, Bush, Gore, Hagelin and Nader are all getting at least some coverage (though I've seen the least for Browne), though I'm not sure who's on the ballots (that varies state-to-state).
Just think what could happen if a certain troublemaking group got all of their members to vote at a certain time (say, they got everyone to vote within an hour-long window), and the rest of the time, they were DoSing the servers. That could have dramatic effects.
I do think that online voting could get a lot more people out voting, as it would only be a 5-minute job, whereas physically going to a poll location, standing in line, etc., could take quite a while.
Regardless, I think this year will have a higher number of people out there voting. However, it's hard to know how things will go. There does appear to be a broader field this year in the Presidential race, which I believe will increase interest. (to be fair, I'll go alphabetically
Hmm.. I should ask -- does anyone have good information about how the Electoral College all works? I know that there are 535 votes in it, but how do those votes get made? Is it just a single person's choice, or do they choices get made by seeing the popular vote in a particular area? Does it vary from state-to-state?
--
Ski-U-Mah!
shut the hell up
--
Ski-U-Mah!
I work at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management as a Solaris and Linux (and occasionally NeXT(!)) administrator. The strange thing about this building is that about a third of the rooms in this building are `sponsored' by somebody. Some of these sponsored rooms are just offices! Each one has a plaque above it saying that somebody helped pay for it.
Some day, I've got to go around and count how many plaques there are... There are a lot of them..
Also, UMN has a contract with Coca-Cola for their beverages. Even the water used at many sporting events comes from Coke (Dasani is a Coca-Cola product).
--
Ski-U-Mah!
``Miguel also should have picked a better title. "Unix sucks" is *not* going to get the mainstream to read the article, they're too used to one-line sound bytes''
``Unix Sucks'' was not the title! The title was ``Let's make UNIX Not Suck''. I don't think there really could have been a better title.
--
Ski-U-Mah!
You're right. Back when I ran PC DOS 7.0, it was a very good DOS. They put a lot of effort into giving as much free memory in the lower 640kB as possible, which was nice. IIRC, I was running with over 600kB free when sitting at a prompt. I didn't run all sorts of fancy things, but it had Doskey, the CD-ROM drivers, mouse, and maybe another thing or two (it's been quite a while).
Hmm.. Looks like it sells for $50-60. A tad spendy, but not too bad (I think they actually include an AntiVirus package, and it also comes with the REXX scripting language).
--
Ski-U-Mah!
I just realized that many Java compilers and utilities for Windows run from the command line. This isn't the end of the world (you could probably make some batch files or something, or have they disappeared too?), but it may cause difficulty..
Oh well, for those that just need a command line, there will always be one, be it Bash or something like OS/2's and WinNT's CMD.EXE.
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Hey guys.. If you want a DOS prompt, why don't you just make a new command interpreter? Also, you can probably still run Bash in WinMe (though I know that Bash on Win32 is horiffically slow..).
Now, for the more interesting problem of 16-bit DOS, effort should be put into the FreeDOS project.
I know WinMe is going to cause trouble. There are a *lot* of devices out there that need bios upgrades, this, that, and the other thing, which are currently only currently possible through DOS. I had to upgrade my BIOS last night, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to boot into DOS, since I didn't have any disks with it. My roommate did have a 98 boot disk, though he runs Win2k these days.
--
Ski-U-Mah!
I'm surprised I haven't seen it mentioned yet (it seems so obvious), but didn't having GWB pontificating from a remote location and displaying it only on bigscreens seem a lot like the Big Brother stuff we've seen before? I mean, I guess it wasn't just focused on his head, but...
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Could you elaborate on that?
--
Ski-U-Mah!
I don't like the choices that are being presented to us by the two primary parties in this country. I'm much more interested in Ralph Nader and the Green party this year. I had been hoping that they would be getting more attention, but the (national) media is still focusing entirely on the Republicans and Democrats.
Nader did get a good reception here in MN when he was here a few weeks ago. He even showed up on Almanac, the local weekly PBS political show.
Certainly, Nader does not completely align himself politically with Ventura, but they are probably closer to what the people want and need than either the RNC or DNC can give the People.
--
Ski-U-Mah!
``...so it should theoretically work with any monitor that supports 1280x1024.''
Whoops.. If you have a fixed-freq monitor, this probably won't work, but it should work for any multisync monitor. I came up with this because my monitor is only spec'd to do 1280x1024, and I didn't want to try my luck at a higher resolution (which would have probably forced me to use lower refresh rates).
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Okay, so it isn't a nice multiple of good numbers, but here's the resolution I've come up with: 1320x992. The number of pixels on the screen is within approximately 0.1% of 1280x1024, so it should theoretically work with any monitor that supports 1280x1024.
I have pasted a few modelines below. The most important number for a lot of people is the dotclock (120 in the example). You can bring that down or up, depending upon how high of refresh rates you can use with your system. IIRC, this runs at about 60 Hz, but it may be a bit higher (65 or so). Please also realize that xvidtune may be of use.
Also note that I'm not a genius when it comes to this stuff, and it could cause bad things to happen (though most modern displays can shut off when fed a bad signal..)
Modeline "1320x992" 120 1320 1348 1516 1752 992 994 999 1036
--
Ski-U-Mah!
``...play with it a little and you'll never use telnet and FTP again''
Of course, people forget about their mail a lot. Here at UMN, our central mail servers run stunnel, so you can read your POP3 or IMAP mail over an SSL tunnel. Before I found out that they were doing this, I was really bothered by how many people could be sniffing my password. I had tried usin SSH tunnels, but that required you to stay logged in.
New versions of Netscape Communicator do support SSL, and I believe recent versions of mutt do too.
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Whoops.. I see from reading some of the other comments that the Evolution guys plan to support a reasonable number of other protocols. Things will move more smoothly, of course, if the protocols are open. Someone mentioned that this may be easy for Notes. I believe that the protocols used by the Pegasus mail suite are also open. (The server costs, and the clients are gratis).
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Hmm..
Unfortunately, there are organizations that disable POP/IMAP/SMTP functionality (well, I know that IBM, for instance, doesn't run POP or IMAP on their Notes servers). What should people in such organizations do? I suppose someone could make an intermediary program to translate between protocols, such as POP<->Notes or IMAP<->Exchange, but that requires Yet Another Dæmon running on your system..
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Perhaps it would be a good idea for IBM/Lotus to look into helping these guys out. There are a lot of people (including me) who get mail through Lotus Notes. (actually, I've set up a forwarding address, so the Notes server sends mail to Sendmail on my box. No retrieval necessary..)
Anyway, even at IBM, there are a lot of people on AIX or Linux who need to run some sort of VNC-ish program to access mail through an NT box running somewhere deep inside the building.
Just a thought.
--
Ski-U-Mah!
In Evolution 0.2, I couldn't find a way to view the headers (and I didn't see anything in the 0.3 announcement). Of course, it's got that open-sourceness thing going for it, so if it's not a feature by, say, 0.5, I'll put it in myself..
I was really impressed with 0.2 (though I never got it to compile..). I just hope some packages pop up soon on helix-update..
--
Ski-U-Mah!
With these huge corporations that are in existence today, it is very hard to go through with a complete boycott. For example, many of us know and love Sony for making high-quality audio, video, and computer hardware. Sony also has a presence in the music and movie industries. Should I not buy that Trinitron display I've been lusting after because I don't like how their music division is behaving? That's a personal decision.
:-p )
With a company like Disney, it gets even worse, as a number of good television programs run on ABC. I prefer to watch ABC News rather than the others (I don't want to have much to do with NBC because of their closeness with Microsoft, and I just don't like CBS News..
The 2600 crew has noticed that few people want to report on their DeCSS case. I've heard Emmanuel say on his radio show that he's had reporters call him up and ask about other topics. He'd politely answer questions, but at the same time would point out that that reporter's organization was on `the other side' in the DeCSS trial. Mostly, he just gets a shrug and some response to the effect of `well, I don't choose the stories..'
Of course, I think you were thinking about movies, and only movies. Personally, I really enjoy a good movie. It provides a good escape, where your mind can unwind for an hour or two. There are a lot of movies that really suck, and I personally have been going to fewer movies since the DeCSS thing started, though I still go. I try to only go to the `good' movies, the ones I'll really enjoy.
It is extremely difficult to avoid the products of companies involved here. It's relatively easy to avoid Microsoft. With these big media companies, they're all around you. They may even own your local newspapers or television stations.
Perhaps that's even more of a reason to go through with a boycott..
--
Ski-U-Mah!
If at all possible, I'd recommend getting some 64-bit hardware. Probably an Alpha-based system. Next, get a decent filesystem like ReiserFS or Global Filesystem.
If you are running on x86 hardware, there's not telling if the accesses will be capable of reading large files (>2GB).
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Well, X may not be the best thing out there (in fact, it pretty much sucks for a lot of things..) I've heard about things like Display Postscript and NeWS, and perhaps development should be refocused on rebuilding them and similar projects.
There is a Display Ghostscript project, and many people have heard about the Berlin project. I've watched Berlin a bit, and I'm not sure it's going in a direction I like (they seem to only want one widget toolkit, which is both good and bad).
Obviously, for any of these projects to take off as projects independent of X (right now, they are often used as a layer on top of X), framebuffer support in the Linux kernel must be improved. Therefore, before we go off trying to re-write the world, a good foundation of security and stability must be built into the kernel.
I know many people don't like the idea of having graphics in the kernel, though this can be worked around by having modules that merely open a pathway to the video registers and memory and grant you safe access to the hardware (i.e., no more suid-root graphics systems).
Blah, I'm beginning to ramble (plus I really need to get some work done...)
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Stop the MPAA
Something you may not know about monitors is that having a really big (CRT) screen doesn't necessarily give you the best experience. I was looking at some big Sonys (I probably won't buy one.. I don't think I'll pull in enough cash this summer) and I noticed that the huge 21" displays run at around 96dpi (even at 2048x1536 resolution). However, the monitor I have right now (15", probably about 14" viewable) runs at 1320x992 and has a dpi of about 118. This means that my display can give me crisper text (though I can't fit as much of it on the same size display).
200+ dpi would rock.
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Stop the MPAA
Just out of curiosity, has much effort been put into vector displays in the past decade or so? I presume work has been done (probably for CAD shops..), but they are vastly outnumbered by raster displays.. Also, I suppose it would be (theoretically) possible to convert an ordinary raster display into a vector display, but I have only a small understanding of what goes into a CRT display.. (and there would probably be deficiencies, like you might only be able to display in one color or something..)
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Stop the MPAA
Perhaps this feature could be used to do things like change the phone to ring in vibrate mode, turn down the ringer volume, or something like that. Preferably, this would all be user-configurable, of course..
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Stop the MPAA
Yes, this is a problem. The University of Minnesota nearly adopted a no-SYNs policy for the residence halls, where all SYN packets would be blocked. Fortunately, there was a group of individuals who noticed that there were many `legal' services that would break. Identd would be broken, preventing many people from using IRC. Any sort of net phone software would probably stop working (unless they used UDP or something). Even ICQ would have probably stopped working. The staff at UMN is pretty smart, and it's pretty surprising that they even suggested doing that...
Anyway, I am getting concerned about cable and DSL companies that want to take similar policies. I know that many companies scan their subscribers' computers looking for anything remotely troublesome. You could probably get your connection shut off for even having identd listening on an FTP port, even if in.ftpd or whatever is not installed on your system.
I know that bandwidth is an issue, but it will always be an issue.. I think you could justifiably block a service for a certain amount of time, until your bandwidth supply is enhanced, but they should always be temporary things.
Of course, one thing that my family's cable provider (@home) does is limit upstream bandwidth to some pretty low numbers. I think it's sitting at 112kbps right now. Certainly, that's still a pretty good speed, but it does have an impact...
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Stop the MPAA
IMO, the GPL is slightly less `real' than most other shrink-wrap licenses (and that's really what the GPL is, in most cases. Of course, the GPL only goes into effect when you use or modify the software, not just when you open the `box'..). You (usually) don't click any `accept' button before installing the software. Certainly, the GPL comes with your software, but you usually don't get prompted to accept or reject it.
Where this gets interesting is in the area of DVDs. The movie industry expects consumers to use licensed players to play those movies. However, there is no contract of any sort with the consumer stating that they are required to do so. So, if the worst happens, and the GPL is struck down, we at least know that the DVD industry is way out of line by trying to enforce invisible contracts..
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Stop the MPAA