Score 2? For an obviously racist remark? Get a life!
First, I posted at +2 because my Karma is always within a few points of 50.
Next, "German" isn't a race (despite the master race terminology that was ever so popular at one time). After thousands of Americans lost their lives in Europe fighting against Germany, I've got a moral right to make a snide remark or two if I choose. It's not like the Nazi party consisted of four people. On March 29th, 1936, the German people were given the opportunity to express their approval or disapproval of Hitler's National Socialist state. It was an entirely free election without fear or intimidation with adequate provision made for monitoring by neutral observers. Over 44 million German people approved, giving Hitler 98.8% of the vote. As another poster pointed out, "They do have a history, ya know."
So it's their customer's duty to provide safe, free storage for however long it takes Telocity to decide that they want the gateways back? If you will store my sh*t for as long as I want for free, paying me if you can't return it, I'll be over with the first load in a few hours!
Any reasonable person would assume that Telocity had abandoned the hardware when they canceled service and did not require/request return of the box in a timely manner. Some of these people have stored the box longer than they had service!
Did they pay you to store their equipment after canceling your service? If they had asked for the box back within a week of canceling the service, that would be a very different matter. How long should you have been expected to store and protect it for them? A week? A month? A year? A decade? Do you think that commercial storage space is free?
And what is your time worth? After they reneged on their obligation to provide you with DSL service, did they pay you for your time and inconvenience of finding another provider, staying home from work during the install, distributing your new e-mail address to your contacts, etc.? I don't know about you, but a $500 box hardly would be compensation to me for that headache.
If Telocity had asked for the gateways back at the time that they unilaterally stopped service, that would be one thing. But to leave this hardware in customer hands all this time would lead most customers to believe that Telocity did not want the gateways back.
If I had been a Telocity customer, I would demand that Telocity pay storage fees on the hardware that they abandoned at my home for the last few months. The contract you signed may have said you would return it, but it didn't say that you would store and protect it for free for weeks or months after they cut off your service.
Since no one knows the identity of every user of Killustrator, the only way that the University of Magdeburg could identify the users and destroy every copy of Killustrator would be to take over the entire world, force their way into people's homes, search their computers, and destroy all copies of Killustrator -- all without cause or legal grounds. To you, as Germans, this probably sounds like a great idea. But this idea makes us non-Germans uneasy.
Re:But you PROMISED me...
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 3
As usual, Jon Katz did a superb, intelligent job delving beyond the shallow surface of the screen. If you don't appreciate his work, it reflects poorly on you rather than him.
Finally an explanation for this crap! I've wondered for a long time what was motivating this psycho. I wish his company had charged him with theft and that he was in prison rather than annoying people on Slashdot.
You clearly feel that owning "huge tracts of land" means that your vote should be given higher weight. People in North Dakota should have a much higher influence on the election than people living in New York or L.A. in your world view.
I think that this election just shows what a shame it is that we still have the antiquated electoral college (something I have railed against since long before G.W. Bush ever thought of running for President). One person. One vote. And all of those votes should count and count the same. Living in a populous area should not mean that your vote is devalued. Nor should your vote be given extra weight because you live on 100 acres in Wyoming.
I don't care about number of counties, number of states, square miles, or any of that. What I care about is that the majority of Americans selected Al Gore as their choice for President and George W. Bush is now in office despite the vote. And that is a travesty no matter how you spin it.
The legal team in place now, since Bush cut funding for the legal effort, is strapped for cash and talent. Had the original legal team been there, it's very possible that they could have countered Microsoft's arguments more effectively and convinced the court not to vacate the original decision.
If O.J. won solely based on bias, why did he waste millions of dollars hiring the legal "dream team." From what you argue, he could have won it with a public prosecutor. (Remember the try-on-the-glove incident? Had O.J.'s lawyers been facing worthy adversaries, that fiasco would never have happened.)
You need to spend a little more time reading the newspaper and a little less reading Slashdot. Your lack of understanding in this case, the O.J. case, and world events is scary.
O.J. Simpson won because he had a better legal team than the government did. The same thing just happened here. Bush got into office and cut funding for the Justice Department's legal efforts against Microsoft. The legal team now in place pales in comparison to the one that tried the case the first time. You don't have to control the courts. You just have to control the budget of one of the legal teams.
This is insightful? Since when does the executive branch have anything to do with the judical branches decisions?
When the executive branch cuts funding for an expensive legal effort by the Justice Department, the outcome is not hard to predict. And when judges rely on the President to appoint them to higher court positions, it's not surprising that some of them suddenly make rulings that are in line with the current President's views.
Who do you think nominates judges to the Supreme Court? Any judge who wants to further his career does whatever he thinks will please those who will make or break him. Believing that the executive branch has nothing to do with this injustice is childish and ignorant.
Thank you for expressing something that I wrongly assumed the average Slashdot reader would understand. In addition to that, Bush cut funding for the Justice Department efforts and gutted the legal team assigned to the case.
Let me clarify now that I got the first post (and it was even on-topic). Once George Bush got into the White House (by getting 539,947 fewer votes than Al Gore), there was no question that Microsoft, being the biggest of the big businesses, was certain to be able to continue business-as-usual. That's why we are seeing a renewed effort on Microsoft's part to use their monopolistic powers to control both the market and their customers. Smart tags, the.NET initiative, more restrictive EULAs, leased software, and the Linux bashing are just the tip of the iceberg. It is only going to get worse over the next three and a half years.
The parent to this was not a "troll." He's right. Intel does deserve to suffer for their pact with Rambus and I share his sentiments. I have to believe that the moderator owns an Intel-based PC...
I hope that consumers fail to see how you have an inferior product and all!
How can you make such an inane statement? The AMD Athlon's provide far more bang-for-the-buck than do the Intell PIIIs and PIVs. The floating point units in the Athlons are better than those in the Pentiums. I own an Athlon, Duron, Pentium III, and Celeron-based systems, so, unlike some people (you?), I'm not talking out of my a$$. I switched from Intel to AMD because AMD had a far-superior product for the money.
Freelance authors were paid for the print rights to their works. The authors had a reasonable expectation that the audience would be limited to the readers of one issue of the publication. Why should that author/photographer not be able to negotiate a fair compensation for the publisher making that work available 24/7 to the entire surfing public -- an audience that dwarfs any print-media audience?
Once it is on the web, the author is at a much greater risk of his material be plagiarized and republished without his permission. It may reduce the value of the work through overexposure (many authors and photographers are very careful to limit the exposure of their work).
And what about the author of a popular column that wants to publish his own web site with a compilation of his works? If that same compilation can be had on www.nytimes.com, it certainly reduces the potential value of the author's web site.
This is an example of the typical Slashdot hypocrisy. Many Slashdot readers are quick to spew venom at big companies that rip people off --unless the big companies are ripping people off to make content available on the Internet. Then it's okay.
No, I do not. I recognize that some authors are comfortable allowing their works to be resold by others at a profit while others are not. What I was proposing was a second type of GPL license for those authors that do not want their work resold with per-seat licenses.
If there is "nothing wrong selling" per-seat licenses for GPL'd software, why are there hundreds of messages in this thread? Obviously there is not unanimous agreement with you on this matter.
1. How is a Linux distribution company supposed to turn a profit if a 1,000 person company buys one license and installs it on 1,000 workstations?
2. Has anyone asked Caldera for a list of their proprietary components? Suppose that I want to install their distro and remove the proprietary components. (I just asked them and await their reply.)
3. How is this different from non-GPL OS distributions like Windows? Oh, yeah. Microsoft paid software engineers to develop their code. Caldera took software that people wanted freely distributed and bundled it into a per-seat license arrangement.
4. Should we come up with a GPL II that forbids the inclusion of the program in question on any per-seat licensed OS?
The fact that a web site is is available for free does not mean that the entity running it is doing so at no profit. In the case of a newspaper web site, they attract print subscribers through the web site (with many processing subscriptions online) and they can sell advertising.
The value of a column is directly related to how many potential readers there are. What The New York Times may pay for an article is probably a lot lower than what The Rose Hill Shopper is likely to pay -- even if it's the same article.
A newspaper should not be allowed to take work that they licensed to publish to their limited customer base and put it up online for the world to see -- unless they work out compensation for the writer. And that's what the Supreme Court just said.
Whether or not this decision was right, it's NOT good news for web users.
What you mean is that compensating creative people when their work is published online is "NOT good" for web users. What about those web users who wrote those columns?
Arcades are like movie theaters. They are a public meeting place. They can be a place to meet new people, strike up conversations, compete for high score, and so on. In other words, they provide a healthy, social setting.
Sitting at home in front of a TV, cradling some 2 oz. cheap plastic controller in your lap is not the same.
Arcades are a way to go out and enjoy something in the real world while home console games are a way to hide away from the world.
Gates does not like the GPL because he cannot incorporate GPL software in Microsoft's for-profit products. He likes free software -- but only if, by "free", we mean "free for Microsoft to take, modify, and sell without compensation to the original authors." That's his idea of how "free software" licenses should work.
And this is exactly what the GPL license prevents: Companies cannot incorporate GPL source code while not giving something back to the GPL community. It forces a barter system.
Gates won't even release a Linux version of Office as a for-profit commercial product, but he's mad that the GPL prevents him from raiding the free software repositories to create Microsoft's commercial products.
Please stop the uninformed "speed kills" nonsense. According to data collected by the insurance companies and by the federal government, the drivers that have the lowest accident rate on the highways are travelling significantly above the posted limit.
I have two Palms and my next handheld will also probably be Palm OS based (Visor, Handera, Sony, etc.) I'm sticking with this for a few reasons:
1. Battery life. Not having a color display, 16mb ROM, 32mb RAM, 200+mhz CPU, etc. means that the batteries last a lot longer in the Palm.
2. Application choices and size. Palm apps tend to be very compact because, unlike WinCE, the Palm OS is only as complicated as it needs to be and no more so. If the apps are small, you don't need 32MB of RAM to store them. Palm apps are widely available and have been developed for years.
3. Price. While I can easily afford a $600 handheld, it's more than I want to spend. If my $150 Palm breaks, I replace it and throw the old one away. If a $600 iPaq breaks, I'm going to have to get it fixed and be without it while it is being serviced.
4. Basic functionality. The Palm does what I need. I can use it for note-taking. I can store addresses and phone numbers in it. I can use it for an alarm clock, calculator, or handheld game machine (I like chess, go, Othello, and other board games). While I could play action games on the iPaq, I have a real computer for that.
Neither the Palm nor the iPaq devices will substitute for a laptop or desktop computer. You can develop apps on them (with great pain). You can, in a pinch, use them for e-mail. But they just aren't real PCs. When people are demanding 14" and larger screens in laptops, it's pretty clear that the 3" screen in a handheld is no substitute.
In closing, decide if you need a handheld. Figure out what you will use it for. If you are like most people, the Palm devices will suit your needs fine. And you probably won't need color, either.
Troll? It was a joke! Well, at least two out of three moderators got it (two +1 funny, one -1 troll). Who is the idiot that can't distinguish the difference between a troll and a joke? Oh well, I guess I'd rather have you moderating Slashdot than going out and reproducing... as unlikely as the latter seems.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I posted at +2 because my Karma is always within a few points of 50.
Next, "German" isn't a race (despite the master race terminology that was ever so popular at one time). After thousands of Americans lost their lives in Europe fighting against Germany, I've got a moral right to make a snide remark or two if I choose. It's not like the Nazi party consisted of four people. On March 29th, 1936, the German people were given the opportunity to express their approval or disapproval of Hitler's National Socialist state. It was an entirely free election without fear or intimidation with adequate provision made for monitoring by neutral observers. Over 44 million German people approved, giving Hitler 98.8% of the vote. As another poster pointed out, "They do have a history, ya know."
Any reasonable person would assume that Telocity had abandoned the hardware when they canceled service and did not require/request return of the box in a timely manner. Some of these people have stored the box longer than they had service!
And what is your time worth? After they reneged on their obligation to provide you with DSL service, did they pay you for your time and inconvenience of finding another provider, staying home from work during the install, distributing your new e-mail address to your contacts, etc.? I don't know about you, but a $500 box hardly would be compensation to me for that headache.
If I had been a Telocity customer, I would demand that Telocity pay storage fees on the hardware that they abandoned at my home for the last few months. The contract you signed may have said you would return it, but it didn't say that you would store and protect it for free for weeks or months after they cut off your service.
Since no one knows the identity of every user of Killustrator, the only way that the University of Magdeburg could identify the users and destroy every copy of Killustrator would be to take over the entire world, force their way into people's homes, search their computers, and destroy all copies of Killustrator -- all without cause or legal grounds. To you, as Germans, this probably sounds like a great idea. But this idea makes us non-Germans uneasy.
As usual, Jon Katz did a superb, intelligent job delving beyond the shallow surface of the screen. If you don't appreciate his work, it reflects poorly on you rather than him.
Finally an explanation for this crap! I've wondered for a long time what was motivating this psycho. I wish his company had charged him with theft and that he was in prison rather than annoying people on Slashdot.
I think that this election just shows what a shame it is that we still have the antiquated electoral college (something I have railed against since long before G.W. Bush ever thought of running for President). One person. One vote. And all of those votes should count and count the same. Living in a populous area should not mean that your vote is devalued. Nor should your vote be given extra weight because you live on 100 acres in Wyoming.
I don't care about number of counties, number of states, square miles, or any of that. What I care about is that the majority of Americans selected Al Gore as their choice for President and George W. Bush is now in office despite the vote. And that is a travesty no matter how you spin it.
If O.J. won solely based on bias, why did he waste millions of dollars hiring the legal "dream team." From what you argue, he could have won it with a public prosecutor. (Remember the try-on-the-glove incident? Had O.J.'s lawyers been facing worthy adversaries, that fiasco would never have happened.)
You need to spend a little more time reading the newspaper and a little less reading Slashdot. Your lack of understanding in this case, the O.J. case, and world events is scary.
O.J. Simpson won because he had a better legal team than the government did. The same thing just happened here. Bush got into office and cut funding for the Justice Department's legal efforts against Microsoft. The legal team now in place pales in comparison to the one that tried the case the first time. You don't have to control the courts. You just have to control the budget of one of the legal teams.
When the executive branch cuts funding for an expensive legal effort by the Justice Department, the outcome is not hard to predict. And when judges rely on the President to appoint them to higher court positions, it's not surprising that some of them suddenly make rulings that are in line with the current President's views.
Thank you for expressing something that I wrongly assumed the average Slashdot reader would understand. In addition to that, Bush cut funding for the Justice Department efforts and gutted the legal team assigned to the case.
Let me clarify now that I got the first post (and it was even on-topic). Once George Bush got into the White House (by getting 539,947 fewer votes than Al Gore), there was no question that Microsoft, being the biggest of the big businesses, was certain to be able to continue business-as-usual. That's why we are seeing a renewed effort on Microsoft's part to use their monopolistic powers to control both the market and their customers. Smart tags, the .NET initiative, more restrictive EULAs, leased software, and the Linux bashing are just the tip of the iceberg. It is only going to get worse over the next three and a half years.
See subject.
The parent to this was not a "troll." He's right. Intel does deserve to suffer for their pact with Rambus and I share his sentiments. I have to believe that the moderator owns an Intel-based PC...
How can you make such an inane statement? The AMD Athlon's provide far more bang-for-the-buck than do the Intell PIIIs and PIVs. The floating point units in the Athlons are better than those in the Pentiums. I own an Athlon, Duron, Pentium III, and Celeron-based systems, so, unlike some people (you?), I'm not talking out of my a$$. I switched from Intel to AMD because AMD had a far-superior product for the money.
Once it is on the web, the author is at a much greater risk of his material be plagiarized and republished without his permission. It may reduce the value of the work through overexposure (many authors and photographers are very careful to limit the exposure of their work).
And what about the author of a popular column that wants to publish his own web site with a compilation of his works? If that same compilation can be had on www.nytimes.com, it certainly reduces the potential value of the author's web site.
This is an example of the typical Slashdot hypocrisy. Many Slashdot readers are quick to spew venom at big companies that rip people off --unless the big companies are ripping people off to make content available on the Internet. Then it's okay.
No, I do not. I recognize that some authors are comfortable allowing their works to be resold by others at a profit while others are not. What I was proposing was a second type of GPL license for those authors that do not want their work resold with per-seat licenses.
If there is "nothing wrong selling" per-seat licenses for GPL'd software, why are there hundreds of messages in this thread? Obviously there is not unanimous agreement with you on this matter.
1. How is a Linux distribution company supposed to turn a profit if a 1,000 person company buys one license and installs it on 1,000 workstations? 2. Has anyone asked Caldera for a list of their proprietary components? Suppose that I want to install their distro and remove the proprietary components. (I just asked them and await their reply.) 3. How is this different from non-GPL OS distributions like Windows? Oh, yeah. Microsoft paid software engineers to develop their code. Caldera took software that people wanted freely distributed and bundled it into a per-seat license arrangement. 4. Should we come up with a GPL II that forbids the inclusion of the program in question on any per-seat licensed OS?
The value of a column is directly related to how many potential readers there are. What The New York Times may pay for an article is probably a lot lower than what The Rose Hill Shopper is likely to pay -- even if it's the same article. A newspaper should not be allowed to take work that they licensed to publish to their limited customer base and put it up online for the world to see -- unless they work out compensation for the writer. And that's what the Supreme Court just said.
Whether or not this decision was right, it's NOT good news for web users.
What you mean is that compensating creative people when their work is published online is "NOT good" for web users. What about those web users who wrote those columns?
Sitting at home in front of a TV, cradling some 2 oz. cheap plastic controller in your lap is not the same.
Arcades are a way to go out and enjoy something in the real world while home console games are a way to hide away from the world.
Gates does not like the GPL because he cannot incorporate GPL software in Microsoft's for-profit products. He likes free software -- but only if, by "free", we mean "free for Microsoft to take, modify, and sell without compensation to the original authors." That's his idea of how "free software" licenses should work.
And this is exactly what the GPL license prevents: Companies cannot incorporate GPL source code while not giving something back to the GPL community. It forces a barter system.
Gates won't even release a Linux version of Office as a for-profit commercial product, but he's mad that the GPL prevents him from raiding the free software repositories to create Microsoft's commercial products.
Please stop the uninformed "speed kills" nonsense. According to data collected by the insurance companies and by the federal government, the drivers that have the lowest accident rate on the highways are travelling significantly above the posted limit.
1. Battery life. Not having a color display, 16mb ROM, 32mb RAM, 200+mhz CPU, etc. means that the batteries last a lot longer in the Palm.
2. Application choices and size. Palm apps tend to be very compact because, unlike WinCE, the Palm OS is only as complicated as it needs to be and no more so. If the apps are small, you don't need 32MB of RAM to store them. Palm apps are widely available and have been developed for years.
3. Price. While I can easily afford a $600 handheld, it's more than I want to spend. If my $150 Palm breaks, I replace it and throw the old one away. If a $600 iPaq breaks, I'm going to have to get it fixed and be without it while it is being serviced.
4. Basic functionality. The Palm does what I need. I can use it for note-taking. I can store addresses and phone numbers in it. I can use it for an alarm clock, calculator, or handheld game machine (I like chess, go, Othello, and other board games). While I could play action games on the iPaq, I have a real computer for that.
Neither the Palm nor the iPaq devices will substitute for a laptop or desktop computer. You can develop apps on them (with great pain). You can, in a pinch, use them for e-mail. But they just aren't real PCs. When people are demanding 14" and larger screens in laptops, it's pretty clear that the 3" screen in a handheld is no substitute.
In closing, decide if you need a handheld. Figure out what you will use it for. If you are like most people, the Palm devices will suit your needs fine. And you probably won't need color, either.
Troll? It was a joke! Well, at least two out of three moderators got it (two +1 funny, one -1 troll). Who is the idiot that can't distinguish the difference between a troll and a joke? Oh well, I guess I'd rather have you moderating Slashdot than going out and reproducing... as unlikely as the latter seems.