kind of ironic, isn't it? An article about what appears, despite a lack of a great deal of real facts here or in the 2600 article, to be a blatant violation of the right to free speech and assembly and all that other good stuff, and the overwhelming consensus seems to be that CmdrTaco shouldn't be able to voice his opinions...
because if they keep getting away with this crap, eventually everyone ELSE who once also offered good service will go out of business when amazon finally manages to patent the concept of business itself...
Evidently, this isn't entirely a new revelation. A quick altavista sear ch returned this (among others), which is older than this article (hasn't been touched since '98) but goes into a LOT more detail on this thing. This may be out of date for all I know, but it was kinda hard to tell from the posted article which had breathtakingly little real information in it... Too bad, too, this looks like some interesting stuff. I wish I knew enough on the subject to have some guess as to whether this is really an exciting thing, or just somebody trying to generate some publicity...
I get the impression that Linux was a bit more of an afterthought that you make it seem.. according to the article, the Mac and Amiga ports "will be ready as soon as possible", while the Linux port won't be out until the second quarter of this year. Closer to the beginning of the article, it mentions that the Mac and Amiga ports have been in the works for a while, and the Linux port was just added to the deal.
Still, though, I agree that the CEO's tone is a good sign. Sounds like they're excited about the port, rather than just kind of grudgingly allowing it. Very cool.
Well first, if you're getting *very* bored after only "a couple of cases", you haven't got much of an attention span.
Second, "abuse of justice" isn't quite the term you're looking for. More like "abuse of law". The problem here is that justice is precisely what's NOT happening because there's a problem with the system of laws, and that's what's being abused. I don't see a problem with people complainig if they think there's something wrong with the system that's supposed to be protecting their rights and delivering justice. Those things are kinda important.
Legal precedent is not the only kind of precedent that exists. If Amazon buckles under public pressure on this one, then anyone else who might want to do this has not only the legal system to think about, but also that same public pressure.
Besides, if you have such faith that things like this will be shot down in court (which I don't share), then it doesn't matter whether it's Amazon or the next guy who gets the legal precedent set. This way, we're at least voicing our opinins as well.
Just because people don't agree with you, it doesn't mean they didn't think about it. I respect RMS because of what he is to free software, and even moreso for his convictions, even though I do usually feel that he pretty much needs to shut up most of the time.
This isn't one of those times. I don't see it as idiotic to protest due process. I do, however, see it as worthwhile to send a message to Amazon and anyone else who tries or thinks of trying to pull this sort of thing that, even if you're protected legally by due process, that process and the laws that are protecting it are not infallible.
Changing that would be real nice and all, and I hope it happens someday, but in the meantime there's nothing wrong with pointing out to anyone who would take advantage of a broken system, like Amazon has, that there are those of us out here who WILL call them on it.
After all, do you want people to think for themselves, or wait for the system to do their thinking for them?
If people overusing the term "Nazi" in a negative sense reduces the true horror of 6 million murders for you, I'd say you've got some issues of your own you should be worried about... If you wanna say it's too harsh a term to be applied to Echelon, I'll agree with you there. But in my opinion, the attitude that misuse of the term "Nazi" trivializes what they did is part of the mentality that allows things like Echelon to exist in the first place. Worry about people remembering that killing 6 million people is a horrible thing. As far as people remembering in 500 years that the Nazis actually did so, well, you know what they say.. any press is good press
I haven't really got much interest in the rest of your comment, but I did think it'd be fun to point out that nobody called anybody a Nazi.. You were the first one to use the word, except the guy who said "Ask the Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals of Nazi occupied europe if it's a red herring," but the only people he was calling Nazis were, well, Nazis.
Although I did notice you calling people pinheads.. hmm.. go figure..
I think that, even if the relationship isn't all that direct, speed limits are a good and frighteningly well accepted example of the same kind of mentality that lets the government take all sorts of things away from people, even if they shouldn't be taken away, and his example was a good illustration of that.
If the reason speeding is bad is that you're more likely to have an accident if you do it, thus either injuring someone or damaging their property, why do we need a new law against speeding? Isn't it already illegal to injure other people or damage their property? It's (roughly) attacking a symptom rather than a problem. That's bad, because a symptom is not necessarily proportionate to the problem.
It's the same mentality that lets them dig around looking for symptoms in order to prevent the larger problems, thus saving the children and all that crap. That digging around being what's in question here...
And as for the "the cops are nice anyway" idea, I just can't finish up without expressing how much I hate that one.. If you see it as a good thing that nobody gets pulled over for going 10 over the limit, isn't there something wrong with the limit? Nobody minds because, like you said, the cops are "nice" and don't fine you, but of course you're all convieniently breaking the law, just in case they ever decide they do want to fine you. Maybe you looked at them funny or something...
RAM and overclocking aren't similar. Saying "who needs to overclock when you have 550mhz?" is similar to saying "who will ever need more than 640k of RAM?" in that a reasonable answer to either question is "In a few years, you will."
And it doesn't bother you that there are people in the government who come up with stuff like this and are so unconcerned with privacy that the effects this stuff has on privacy aren't apparent to them?
Not like this should be a real shock or anything, but if people just get tired of getting upset about it, there's nothing left to stop it from happening.
This would be a huge roadblock for Open Source stuff.. You'd have to prove that everything submitted to an OSS project came from a certified programmer to be taken seriously by corporations.
Plus, given the way Microsoft stacks up against OSS so far, I'd say that the certification idea would do absolutely nothing to get the desired results.
I'm sure a few adopt extreme lifestyles as a cry for help.
I'm sure many others adopt extreme lifestyles because they don't feel that the norm has anything to offer them, particularly help.
Personally, I don't go out of my way to look outwardly different very often. I almost never go out of my way to conform. When I do go out of my way to look different, the reason is that I look at everyone who DOES go out of their way to conform, and all I want to say is "I'm NOT you, and I'm PROUD of it." That is, after all, what "different" means.
Hardly a cry for help, certainly not for their help if it were.
You're talking about investigating everyone who's different because a few might snap. The norm is the norm because it is what the majority is. Most likely, the majority of those doing the investigating will, therefore, fall into "the norm". The majority, as we've been seeing, doesn't take kindly to the minority. It isn't hard to make the jump here from "investigating" to "harassing". It would be naieve to think it wouldn't happen.
Isn't "release early, release often" kind of a major part of OSS stuff? The big problem with Microsoft throwing crap out on the market is that you can't fix it. With Linux, if something buggy goes out, chances are somebody will have a fix out there way before a company like Microsoft would release the next service pack. I guess I could be wrong about it, this is more from what I've read than from experience, it just seems like saying oranges suck because they don't taste quite like apples.
Of course, this would be a problem for people who don't know enough or just aren't willing to go out and find the fixes, but I still see it as more of a problem (for some) with the way the open source model works than with Red Hat. Besides, from a buisness point of view, isn't it one of the advantages of open source that you get to spend less time/money on debugging because other people will help out once you relase?
First, I disagree with the idea that whether the cartoons were funny or tasteless has anything to do with this. Certainly, yes, they were tasteless, but some people find that sort of thing funny. It's immature, but it doesn't hurt anybody, and it gives some people entertainment.
As for directly copying the strip, this kinda treads on the same ground as the usual IP arguments that we get plenty of with the whole Linux/OSS thing. By the letter of the law, copying the strip like that probably does step over the line, but I am of the opinion that the letter of the law is often broken.
Theft would be legitimate, but I don't think I see that here. They used the characters that somebody else created, yes. Does this prevent the original creator from using those characters, or in any other way fall into the usual "You had this, but now I have it and you don't" sort of thing that makes theft wrong? Not in any way that I can see. Libel? Not really. The characters are saying tasteless things, but this doesn't really attack anybody. Since they go out of their way to say that the comics are parodies and not created by the people who do Dilbert, they aren't trying to pass the strips off as something that came from those people. Nobody in their right mind would think any less of Dilbert just because some jackass with a paint program figured out he could cut and paste text into a Dilbert comic.
As for the strips not being a parody, just trying to be obscene, I'm not sure I agree with that, either. I don't think it'd be that far-fetched to say that they're parodizing office life. The pointy-haired boss calling Dilbert "fatty queercakes" isn't really all that funny, but I did get a chuckle out of these strips because they take place in an office environment. I'm used to the office environment being formal and professional, so something like that strikes me as kinda funny in small doses. Scott Adams doesn't own office humor. He owns the Dilbert characters, yes, but like I said before, this doesn't effect that ownership of them. He owns them as much now as he did before Dilbert Hole ever happened.
If the guy who did Dilbert Hole had drawn the strips himself, it would have had a lot more creative value on its own, but I don't see how he should be punished for using the Dilbert characters any more than being told it's not that creative.
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kind of ironic, isn't it? An article about what appears, despite a lack of a great deal of real facts here or in the 2600 article, to be a blatant violation of the right to free speech and assembly and all that other good stuff, and the overwhelming consensus seems to be that CmdrTaco shouldn't be able to voice his opinions...
I'd rather see it work than see it soon. :)
because if they keep getting away with this crap, eventually everyone ELSE who once also offered good service will go out of business when amazon finally manages to patent the concept of business itself...
Evidently, this isn't entirely a new revelation. A quick altavista sear ch returned this (among others), which is older than this article (hasn't been touched since '98) but goes into a LOT more detail on this thing. This may be out of date for all I know, but it was kinda hard to tell from the posted article which had breathtakingly little real information in it... Too bad, too, this looks like some interesting stuff. I wish I knew enough on the subject to have some guess as to whether this is really an exciting thing, or just somebody trying to generate some publicity...
I get the impression that Linux was a bit more of an afterthought that you make it seem.. according to the article, the Mac and Amiga ports "will be ready as soon as possible", while the Linux port won't be out until the second quarter of this year. Closer to the beginning of the article, it mentions that the Mac and Amiga ports have been in the works for a while, and the Linux port was just added to the deal.
Still, though, I agree that the CEO's tone is a good sign. Sounds like they're excited about the port, rather than just kind of grudgingly allowing it. Very cool.
Well first, if you're getting *very* bored after only "a couple of cases", you haven't got much of an attention span.
Second, "abuse of justice" isn't quite the term you're looking for. More like "abuse of law". The problem here is that justice is precisely what's NOT happening because there's a problem with the system of laws, and that's what's being abused. I don't see a problem with people complainig if they think there's something wrong with the system that's supposed to be protecting their rights and delivering justice. Those things are kinda important.
Legal precedent is not the only kind of precedent that exists. If Amazon buckles under public pressure on this one, then anyone else who might want to do this has not only the legal system to think about, but also that same public pressure.
Besides, if you have such faith that things like this will be shot down in court (which I don't share), then it doesn't matter whether it's Amazon or the next guy who gets the legal precedent set. This way, we're at least voicing our opinins as well.
Just because people don't agree with you, it doesn't mean they didn't think about it. I respect RMS because of what he is to free software, and even moreso for his convictions, even though I do usually feel that he pretty much needs to shut up most of the time.
This isn't one of those times. I don't see it as idiotic to protest due process. I do, however, see it as worthwhile to send a message to Amazon and anyone else who tries or thinks of trying to pull this sort of thing that, even if you're protected legally by due process, that process and the laws that are protecting it are not infallible.
Changing that would be real nice and all, and I hope it happens someday, but in the meantime there's nothing wrong with pointing out to anyone who would take advantage of a broken system, like Amazon has, that there are those of us out here who WILL call them on it.
After all, do you want people to think for themselves, or wait for the system to do their thinking for them?
If people overusing the term "Nazi" in a negative sense reduces the true horror of 6 million murders for you, I'd say you've got some issues of your own you should be worried about... If you wanna say it's too harsh a term to be applied to Echelon, I'll agree with you there. But in my opinion, the attitude that misuse of the term "Nazi" trivializes what they did is part of the mentality that allows things like Echelon to exist in the first place. Worry about people remembering that killing 6 million people is a horrible thing. As far as people remembering in 500 years that the Nazis actually did so, well, you know what they say.. any press is good press
I haven't really got much interest in the rest of your comment, but I did think it'd be fun to point out that nobody called anybody a Nazi.. You were the first one to use the word, except the guy who said "Ask the Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals of Nazi occupied europe if it's a red herring," but the only people he was calling Nazis were, well, Nazis.
Although I did notice you calling people pinheads.. hmm.. go figure..
I think that, even if the relationship isn't all that direct, speed limits are a good and frighteningly well accepted example of the same kind of mentality that lets the government take all sorts of things away from people, even if they shouldn't be taken away, and his example was a good illustration of that.
If the reason speeding is bad is that you're more likely to have an accident if you do it, thus either injuring someone or damaging their property, why do we need a new law against speeding? Isn't it already illegal to injure other people or damage their property? It's (roughly) attacking a symptom rather than a problem. That's bad, because a symptom is not necessarily proportionate to the problem.
It's the same mentality that lets them dig around looking for symptoms in order to prevent the larger problems, thus saving the children and all that crap. That digging around being what's in question here...
And as for the "the cops are nice anyway" idea, I just can't finish up without expressing how much I hate that one.. If you see it as a good thing that nobody gets pulled over for going 10 over the limit, isn't there something wrong with the limit? Nobody minds because, like you said, the cops are "nice" and don't fine you, but of course you're all convieniently breaking the law, just in case they ever decide they do want to fine you. Maybe you looked at them funny or something...
RAM and overclocking aren't similar. Saying "who needs to overclock when you have 550mhz?" is similar to saying "who will ever need more than 640k of RAM?" in that a reasonable answer to either question is "In a few years, you will."
Yeah, and who'll ever need more than 640k of RAM?
Or whatever the number was...
Hmmm.. the FBI can't use a satellite phone to figure out where I am or listening to what I'm saying right now, since I don't own a satellite phone..
Think I could get the government to buy me one, since it is evidently imperative to national security that the FBI be able to do those things?
And it doesn't bother you that there are people in the government who come up with stuff like this and are so unconcerned with privacy that the effects this stuff has on privacy aren't apparent to them?
Not like this should be a real shock or anything, but if people just get tired of getting upset about it, there's nothing left to stop it from happening.
I'd camp out on line to see the lint documentary.
This would be a huge roadblock for Open Source stuff.. You'd have to prove that everything submitted to an OSS project came from a certified programmer to be taken seriously by corporations.
Plus, given the way Microsoft stacks up against OSS so far, I'd say that the certification idea would do absolutely nothing to get the desired results.
I'm sure a few adopt extreme lifestyles as a cry for help.
I'm sure many others adopt extreme lifestyles because they don't feel that the norm has anything to offer them, particularly help.
Personally, I don't go out of my way to look outwardly different very often. I almost never go out of my way to conform. When I do go out of my way to look different, the reason is that I look at everyone who DOES go out of their way to conform, and all I want to say is "I'm NOT you, and I'm PROUD of it." That is, after all, what "different" means.
Hardly a cry for help, certainly not for their help if it were.
You're talking about investigating everyone who's different because a few might snap. The norm is the norm because it is what the majority is. Most likely, the majority of those doing the investigating will, therefore, fall into "the norm". The majority, as we've been seeing, doesn't take kindly to the minority. It isn't hard to make the jump here from "investigating" to "harassing". It would be naieve to think it wouldn't happen.
Isn't "release early, release often" kind of a major part of OSS stuff? The big problem with Microsoft throwing crap out on the market is that you can't fix it. With Linux, if something buggy goes out, chances are somebody will have a fix out there way before a company like Microsoft would release the next service pack. I guess I could be wrong about it, this is more from what I've read than from experience, it just seems like saying oranges suck because they don't taste quite like apples.
Of course, this would be a problem for people who don't know enough or just aren't willing to go out and find the fixes, but I still see it as more of a problem (for some) with the way the open source model works than with Red Hat. Besides, from a buisness point of view, isn't it one of the advantages of open source that you get to spend less time/money on debugging because other people will help out once you relase?
Didn't you hear? Al Gore helped Linus write the kernel!
First, I disagree with the idea that whether the cartoons were funny or tasteless has anything to do with this. Certainly, yes, they were tasteless, but some people find that sort of thing funny. It's immature, but it doesn't hurt anybody, and it gives some people entertainment.
As for directly copying the strip, this kinda treads on the same ground as the usual IP arguments that we get plenty of with the whole Linux/OSS thing. By the letter of the law, copying the strip like that probably does step over the line, but I am of the opinion that the letter of the law is often broken.
Theft would be legitimate, but I don't think I see that here. They used the characters that somebody else created, yes. Does this prevent the original creator from using those characters, or in any other way fall into the usual "You had this, but now I have it and you don't" sort of thing that makes theft wrong? Not in any way that I can see. Libel? Not really. The characters are saying tasteless things, but this doesn't really attack anybody. Since they go out of their way to say that the comics are parodies and not created by the people who do Dilbert, they aren't trying to pass the strips off as something that came from those people. Nobody in their right mind would think any less of Dilbert just because some jackass with a paint program figured out he could cut and paste text into a Dilbert comic.
As for the strips not being a parody, just trying to be obscene, I'm not sure I agree with that, either. I don't think it'd be that far-fetched to say that they're parodizing office life. The pointy-haired boss calling Dilbert "fatty queercakes" isn't really all that funny, but I did get a chuckle out of these strips because they take place in an office environment. I'm used to the office environment being formal and professional, so something like that strikes me as kinda funny in small doses. Scott Adams doesn't own office humor. He owns the Dilbert characters, yes, but like I said before, this doesn't effect that ownership of them. He owns them as much now as he did before Dilbert Hole ever happened.
If the guy who did Dilbert Hole had drawn the strips himself, it would have had a lot more creative value on its own, but I don't see how he should be punished for using the Dilbert characters any more than being told it's not that creative.