The main argument for keeping child pornography illegal is that it is the product of a crime, and that the victims have a right to protection, especially as the pictures in many cases will serve to worsen the humiliation for the victim.
The russian version is an absolutely fantastic movie, and is highly recommended viewing, though a bit long for some. I watched the movie years before reading the book, and upon reading the book, the images from the movie seemed to med to match perfectly with how everything was described in the book, which is something that happens all to rarely.
Solaris is one of perhaps 2-3 science fiction movies from the former Soviet block that are worth watching, and it's easily one of my top 10 favorite science fiction movies ever...
A "reasonable conclusion" from the information available would be that the robot ended up where
it did just by following it's programmed "instincts" to avoid obstacles, and that it's "escape" might have just been the result of running into the cage and accidentally opening the door.
Reading anything more into it without any more information is certainly not a "reasonable conclusion".
You're assuming that the EULA is actually valid and that the clauses contained with it are actually legal in the first place. Neither are by no means certain, and if they were enforced there would be a pretty good reason to go after Microsoft for violating the Sherman Act on yet another count.
Well, Yahoo is wrong. Microsofts market cap is still
larger than Wal-Marts. Not by that much, though, since Microsoft is down 40% of so from their peak.
So you're saying that 30-40 percent of the UK population are racist willing to switch to the BNP? If so, why haven't they already done so?
Contrary to what you seem to believe, opposition to the monarchy has historically always gotten its strongest support from the left, particularly socialists, communist, trotskyist and anarchist groups, but also to some extend from social democrats, and strongly opposed by the right, including many groups on the far right who see
a republic as stepping on national symbols (the monarchy being one of them).
Looking to France, for instance, this is exactly what you see. The royalist organizations draw their support almost exclusively from the right.
I think that if you believe abolishing the monarchy will change anything - for or against - the BNP, then you are deluded.
That's bullshit. If the queen started voicing even the most remotely controversial ideas about how the UK should be run there would immediately be support in parliament for reducing her importance. Remember the recent changes in the House of Lords? Why do you think that was? It was because the House of Lords didn't understand it's place as a relic, and meddled too much.
There's a long tradition in the remaining European monarchies for the monarch to keep their mouth shut about politics in return for keeping their privileges. It goes so far that much of media immediately start crying foul if the monarch even starts voicing opinions about how things should be run.
The queen is a figurehead, and nothing else. Which makes it even more ridiculous to keep the monarchy.
Exactly how are elected representatives symbols of oppression?
As for anti-monarchists turning their attention elsewhere, I don't see any large groups spending a lot of time or effort in fighting the monarchy beyond criticizing it. It's not worth it, exactly because there are other problems (and mosques and racial minorities are certainly not something I consider a problem) that are more important, so I
certainly don't buy the claim that she functions as a scapegoat.
Monarchy in the UK is just a silly show, but that doesn't stop the majority of the people from supporting it. I guess a lot of people support it because it gives them something to read about in the papers.
Despite wanting to see monarchy in the UK abolished, I must disagree with you. Countless polls have shown that the people in the UK in general support monarchy and supports the royal family. Large groups of the people may want them gone, but unfortunately not the majority.
That would still be flawed, as many OSS projects are very small and wouldn't have any equivalent in the commercial world.
Of course you'll have a small developer base if your project is writing an ls replacement with some great new feature. Many developers on a small project is a hindrance, not a benefit.
Adding to that, a lot of OSS projects are superfluous, stupid, badly written, badly documented, horribly "marketed" at other developers, or not intended for wide usage (written more as tutorials and released in the
odd chance that someone gets a benefit from it).
In the superfluous category, I'll add the umpteen different IRC clients, instant messengers and text editors that seem to be released on a regular basis, most of which die as soon as the developer working on it realize they don't have time to reinvent the wheel and never will catch up with any of the larger projects.
To judge OSS by the total number of projects is fatally flawed because OSS for the very reason that it isn't commercially released software, contains a lot of "hey, I have a MB of space at my hosting providers, so lets throw up some of the stuff I've written" code.
That is not to say that OSS can't be high quality software - it does. However the open source community produces tons of crap too.
Just as commercial development produces tons of crap as well - we just never get to see the most horrific examples (scary though, itsn't it), because not even the sales people believe they can get money for it.
My key point is that for commercial software to be released, a lot of people has to think it has monetary value that can be realised for the company (they may of course be wrong), and that the company has the resources to release it.
On the other hand, the threshold for OSS to be released is only that a single developer has some web space and a few minutes of time to make whatever he/she's currently working on available.
So of course more crap gets released as OSS. And similarly, because there's so much junk out there (both badly written software, and software that doesn't serve any need), a lot of projects will only have one developer because they don't deserve any better.
It's nothing more than natural selection. And it does demonstrate the nature of OSS pretty good: You can't just release something and assume that people will help you out. To get people to help you out, they need to have a reason to do so. Giving the world yet another IRC client with inferior features to what most people are currently using isn't likely to make people donate their time.
But before anyone gets offended: Of course having only one developer doesn't have to mean that the software is bad. It can also mean (as many other people have pointed out), that the software just plain works, and doesn't need anyone else. Or it can mean that while the software is great, whoever is developing it doesn't care about trying to recruit more people, or isn't good enough at marketing their project.
No. Most people are "in" OSS because they are scratching their own itch. I work on an OSS project because by building on a project that was already underway by another company, my company can save lots of money (and have the added security that people outside our company knows how the software works, so that we can hire external people if we need to, something that has already saved our butts once).
Similarly, tons of people work on OSS projects because things they need are already there, and it is cheaper / simpler for them to add the feature they want instead of writing it from scratch.
As for Linux forking, Linux has already been forked tons of times. Linus more or less encourages it, in fact, as it stops a lot of people that are filling weird niches that only a few people need from spending lots of his time to get their obscure stuff into the mainstream kernel.
Forks aren't bad unless they detract effort from eachother. In the case of Linux it's the other way around: General purpose changes that Linus likes go in the mainstream kernel, while stuff he doesn't want to put in the mainstream kernel is developed outside the mainstream tree and thus doesn't take up the time of Linus or other vital core developers. They don't detract from eachother - they complement eachother.
I'm one of the maintainers of the epp-rtk project
on SourceForge. The project has 9 registered developers. But most of the contribution from outside Tucows and the company I work for (GNR) has come from people that are NOT registered as developers for the project, but that are users of the software that has mailed us ideas, suggestions and patches.
And this is for a piece of software with a very limited group of users (ICANN accredited registrars).
This is a microkernel. It's not supposed to be full of features, only support a minimal set of functionality to write servers for to implement a full kernel. Stuffing all kinds of extra driver support in there would be completely counter productive, as the servers running on top of it would most likely provide their own drivers for most hardware anyway.
Perhaps because at some point you as a user are likely to switch mail client, and may have mail you want to migrate. But anyway, this discussion doesn't exactly seem to be a discussion of whats nice for end users, does it? It's a useful discussion for anyone designing or deploying mail systems of various types, including MTAs and MUAs.
Maildir is great as long as you're using a filesystem that can handle it well, such as reiserfs... mbox format can have some advantages on filesystems that handle lots of medium to small files badly (such as ext2fs), though, but I still think the risks of manipulating a single mailbox file from multiple applications is too big to be worth it.
I designed the mail system Nameplanet.com ran on (about 1.5 million mail accounts), and we used qmail with Maildir, but wrote our own highly optimized POP3 server with some extensions (for our web frontend) and caching of size and header data etc., to reduce the amount of stat()'s, and with the few enhancements we did, Maildir was extremely fast (and robust).
"Ever since the communist takeover"? Excuse me, but China was a poor country before Mao took control, and continued to be a poor country afterwards, but at the moment has one of the fastest growth rates in the world. You can blame the regime in China for a lot, including millions dead, but pretending that poverty in China started with the "communist takeover" shows a blatant disregard for history.
If you want to blame them for making life worse for people in many ways, and making some people poorer, sure. But considering large parts of Chinas population had been living at the brink of starvation under colonial rule until the emperor was overthrown, and things hardly got better during the civil war, things were hardly in great shape before they took over either.
Also, trying to present this as something thats unique to China, as opposed to common to poor people everywhere is pretty interesting. Of course poor people will try to avoid spending money on anything but neccessities - everyone generally see avoiding starvation as more critical in their life than the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
Or he was just concerned about what would happen to the carnivore program if anyone outside the buerau would find out (such as if any of the mails saved by mistake where submitted to a court together with the rest), or he just realized that they didn't need the mistakenly saved e-mails and was just going to delete them to avoid cluttering up the system. Etc. etc.
You have no basis to say that the FBI agent actually upset - it's not a fact, it is a claim that's been through multiple steps of obfuscation already. You also have no basis to say that if he was upset that is was because he was concerned about privacy issues and not something else (like the possibility of losing his job if something went wrong).
To be really cynical and paranoid: This could have been done on purpose to be used as an argument for allowing Carnivore: "But look, when we did a mistake we deleted ALL the mail, even legitimately intercepted ones just to be sure we didn't violate anyones privacy". Is that likely? Perhaps not, but it's possible, and the article simply isn't enough to rule it out completely.
StarOffice continues to thrive because of the free alternatives. Star Office is based on the same code base as Open Office, remember, which is an open source project. While Sun provides a lot of development work for Open Office, a lot of other people work on it as well. Open Source reduces Suns development costs.
The reason Sun cited for charging for StarOffice 6.0 was customer demand for a shrinkwrap version.
Then just download Open Office. It is free, it is mostly the same codebase as Star Office. What you don't get is printed manuals, support, Word Perfect import/export and a few other minor things.
The Star Office price was set because corporate customers of Sun has asked for a shrinkwrap version that includes support, and because they wanted certain features that Sun hasn't been able to donate to Open Office because they contain third party IP.
There may be a commercial market, but my guess is that a pretty high percentage of their customers will be people that want it because they love playing old games, and are likely using MAME or other emulators as well.
Changing the story and tracking the changes is adding to history. Changing the story is rewriting history. Without letting people know about the changes you are making it appear as if things were reported differently than they were, and make the news source unreliable for research and reference as
it is unclear what the historical version looked like. You don't know if the article was changed to fix minor errors, remove controversial content or gloss over embarrassing errors.
It also makes it harder for you to judge the quality of news reports, as you don't know if they initially routinely contain errors that are corrected later, and that you won't be told about later.
Slashdot Mirror
The main argument for keeping child pornography illegal is that it is the product of a crime, and that the victims have a right to protection, especially as the pictures in many cases will serve to worsen the humiliation for the victim.
Solaris is one of perhaps 2-3 science fiction movies from the former Soviet block that are worth watching, and it's easily one of my top 10 favorite science fiction movies ever...
Reading anything more into it without any more information is certainly not a "reasonable conclusion".
You're assuming that the EULA is actually valid and that the clauses contained with it are actually legal in the first place. Neither are by no means certain, and if they were enforced there would be a pretty good reason to go after Microsoft for violating the Sherman Act on yet another count.
Well, Yahoo is wrong. Microsofts market cap is still larger than Wal-Marts. Not by that much, though, since Microsoft is down 40% of so from their peak.
Contrary to what you seem to believe, opposition to the monarchy has historically always gotten its strongest support from the left, particularly socialists, communist, trotskyist and anarchist groups, but also to some extend from social democrats, and strongly opposed by the right, including many groups on the far right who see a republic as stepping on national symbols (the monarchy being one of them).
Looking to France, for instance, this is exactly what you see. The royalist organizations draw their support almost exclusively from the right.
I think that if you believe abolishing the monarchy will change anything - for or against - the BNP, then you are deluded.
There's a long tradition in the remaining European monarchies for the monarch to keep their mouth shut about politics in return for keeping their privileges. It goes so far that much of media immediately start crying foul if the monarch even starts voicing opinions about how things should be run.
The queen is a figurehead, and nothing else. Which makes it even more ridiculous to keep the monarchy.
As for anti-monarchists turning their attention elsewhere, I don't see any large groups spending a lot of time or effort in fighting the monarchy beyond criticizing it. It's not worth it, exactly because there are other problems (and mosques and racial minorities are certainly not something I consider a problem) that are more important, so I certainly don't buy the claim that she functions as a scapegoat.
I don't give a damn about the cost. But I do give a damn about the symbol of oppression that a monarch is.
Monarchy in the UK is just a silly show, but that doesn't stop the majority of the people from supporting it. I guess a lot of people support it because it gives them something to read about in the papers.
Despite wanting to see monarchy in the UK abolished, I must disagree with you. Countless polls have shown that the people in the UK in general support monarchy and supports the royal family. Large groups of the people may want them gone, but unfortunately not the majority.
Of course you'll have a small developer base if your project is writing an ls replacement with some great new feature. Many developers on a small project is a hindrance, not a benefit.
Adding to that, a lot of OSS projects are superfluous, stupid, badly written, badly documented, horribly "marketed" at other developers, or not intended for wide usage (written more as tutorials and released in the odd chance that someone gets a benefit from it).
In the superfluous category, I'll add the umpteen different IRC clients, instant messengers and text editors that seem to be released on a regular basis, most of which die as soon as the developer working on it realize they don't have time to reinvent the wheel and never will catch up with any of the larger projects.
To judge OSS by the total number of projects is fatally flawed because OSS for the very reason that it isn't commercially released software, contains a lot of "hey, I have a MB of space at my hosting providers, so lets throw up some of the stuff I've written" code.
That is not to say that OSS can't be high quality software - it does. However the open source community produces tons of crap too.
Just as commercial development produces tons of crap as well - we just never get to see the most horrific examples (scary though, itsn't it), because not even the sales people believe they can get money for it.
My key point is that for commercial software to be released, a lot of people has to think it has monetary value that can be realised for the company (they may of course be wrong), and that the company has the resources to release it.
On the other hand, the threshold for OSS to be released is only that a single developer has some web space and a few minutes of time to make whatever he/she's currently working on available.
So of course more crap gets released as OSS. And similarly, because there's so much junk out there (both badly written software, and software that doesn't serve any need), a lot of projects will only have one developer because they don't deserve any better.
It's nothing more than natural selection. And it does demonstrate the nature of OSS pretty good: You can't just release something and assume that people will help you out. To get people to help you out, they need to have a reason to do so. Giving the world yet another IRC client with inferior features to what most people are currently using isn't likely to make people donate their time.
But before anyone gets offended: Of course having only one developer doesn't have to mean that the software is bad. It can also mean (as many other people have pointed out), that the software just plain works, and doesn't need anyone else. Or it can mean that while the software is great, whoever is developing it doesn't care about trying to recruit more people, or isn't good enough at marketing their project.
Similarly, tons of people work on OSS projects because things they need are already there, and it is cheaper / simpler for them to add the feature they want instead of writing it from scratch.
As for Linux forking, Linux has already been forked tons of times. Linus more or less encourages it, in fact, as it stops a lot of people that are filling weird niches that only a few people need from spending lots of his time to get their obscure stuff into the mainstream kernel.
Forks aren't bad unless they detract effort from eachother. In the case of Linux it's the other way around: General purpose changes that Linus likes go in the mainstream kernel, while stuff he doesn't want to put in the mainstream kernel is developed outside the mainstream tree and thus doesn't take up the time of Linus or other vital core developers. They don't detract from eachother - they complement eachother.
And this is for a piece of software with a very limited group of users (ICANN accredited registrars).
Go to kt.zork.net and follow the updates on building a Hurd version of Debian... I believe there's been stuff on there about ISOs.
This is a microkernel. It's not supposed to be full of features, only support a minimal set of functionality to write servers for to implement a full kernel. Stuffing all kinds of extra driver support in there would be completely counter productive, as the servers running on top of it would most likely provide their own drivers for most hardware anyway.
Perhaps because at some point you as a user are likely to switch mail client, and may have mail you want to migrate. But anyway, this discussion doesn't exactly seem to be a discussion of whats nice for end users, does it? It's a useful discussion for anyone designing or deploying mail systems of various types, including MTAs and MUAs.
I designed the mail system Nameplanet.com ran on (about 1.5 million mail accounts), and we used qmail with Maildir, but wrote our own highly optimized POP3 server with some extensions (for our web frontend) and caching of size and header data etc., to reduce the amount of stat()'s, and with the few enhancements we did, Maildir was extremely fast (and robust).
If you want to blame them for making life worse for people in many ways, and making some people poorer, sure. But considering large parts of Chinas population had been living at the brink of starvation under colonial rule until the emperor was overthrown, and things hardly got better during the civil war, things were hardly in great shape before they took over either.
Also, trying to present this as something thats unique to China, as opposed to common to poor people everywhere is pretty interesting. Of course poor people will try to avoid spending money on anything but neccessities - everyone generally see avoiding starvation as more critical in their life than the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
You have no basis to say that the FBI agent actually upset - it's not a fact, it is a claim that's been through multiple steps of obfuscation already. You also have no basis to say that if he was upset that is was because he was concerned about privacy issues and not something else (like the possibility of losing his job if something went wrong).
To be really cynical and paranoid: This could have been done on purpose to be used as an argument for allowing Carnivore: "But look, when we did a mistake we deleted ALL the mail, even legitimately intercepted ones just to be sure we didn't violate anyones privacy". Is that likely? Perhaps not, but it's possible, and the article simply isn't enough to rule it out completely.
Being royal by inheritance certainly doesn't preclude you from politically being an anarchist. He said "royals", not "royalists".
The reason Sun cited for charging for StarOffice 6.0 was customer demand for a shrinkwrap version.
The Star Office price was set because corporate customers of Sun has asked for a shrinkwrap version that includes support, and because they wanted certain features that Sun hasn't been able to donate to Open Office because they contain third party IP.
There may be a commercial market, but my guess is that a pretty high percentage of their customers will be people that want it because they love playing old games, and are likely using MAME or other emulators as well.
It also makes it harder for you to judge the quality of news reports, as you don't know if they initially routinely contain errors that are corrected later, and that you won't be told about later.