What does the Hurd do that Mach doesn't? Well, erm, what does RedHat do that Linux doesn't? What does MacOS X do that Darwin doesn't?
Hurd is (currently) built on top of Mach and provides the major operating system services you'd expect in a POSIX-like kernel. Mach is a microkernel and doesn't provide any (well, doesn't provide many) of this kind of thing itself. It acts as a kind of supporting frame for the processes that do the real work.
My employer got me one of these (a LapStation 95CE, which has a similar spec to what you're describing (2000XP?) but with a smaller hard disk and a maximum of 96M of RAM. It came with RedHat 4.3 installed) Don't use the 1600x1200 mode on the screen as it uses some stupid vibrating thing to achieve the effect, and it's ugly and causes eye strain.
You're right that the damned things are rugged. I've lost count of the number of times I've dropped mine, on one occasion on the hard concrete floor of the parking garage, and it still works perfectly. The thumbwheels mouse is quite easy to use once you get the hang of it.
I wouldn't recommend it though. The screen is too small unless you use the vibrating thing, there's almost no expansion potential, and the odd shape makes it difficult to fit in a briefcase or hold under your arm.
Seems remarkably expensive for a machine that apparently runs at 10% of the speed of a low end Wintel system. (Yes, I know StrongARMs are fast, but they're not THAT fast, an 800MHz Cerelon will eat 10 60MHz such CPUs for breakfast. A laptop with the former is generally sub $1000 today, whereas this TBA laptop is going to be nearer the $2000 mark)
(Which I think is a shame, I'd like to see a few non-Wintel systems out there that compete effectively like we had in the late eighties, but right now it looks like it's Apple and that's about it. Sun has a nice $1050ish desktop but no laptops to speak of. *sigh* Come back Commodore, Atari, all is forgiven....)
The entire point is that the French judicial system does not understand that any site on the Internet is reachable by anybody anywhere.
Yes, they do understand that. That's why Yahoo are in trouble.
f they don't like that, they are free to cut all links to the outside world and shut the fuck up, being happy with their isolationist splendor.
That's not up to the French courts. Just as in the US, there's a seperation of powers in France - indeed in most democratic countries. The courts do not make the laws. The French government does.
For now, if Yahoo wants to operate in France or if its executive employees want to visit any country where France can "get them", they'd better obey French law, however outrageously unfair that is.
they can only regulate companies actions in their own country
Someone ought to tell the US to do the same thing.
There's two sides to this, a moral side and a legal side. As usual they're at odds with one another. The US court has moral right on its side, but it has absolutely no say over French law, its opinions are frankly irrelevent to French law, or French cases, except in the relatively small area of where the US government and French government has treaties allowing France to prosecute on US soil.
That just means that the French cannot persue the case through the US courts.
If the French court chooses to levy a huge fine for non-compliance on the US side, and seizes Yahoo assets in France as payment, there's bugger all the US courts can do about it. If Yahoo continues to flout what the French court regards as the law, and the French court issues warrants for the arrest of Yahoo executives, then, yes, the US courts wont be used to extradite Yahoo execs, but European courts and those in countries with extradition treaties with France will be able to enforce this should these people ever leave the US.
I don't agree with the situation. But then, I didn't think it was fair when Dimtry was arrested for activities that are perfectly legal in his own country that were performed in his own country. It's entirely hypocritical for the US to expect citizens of other countries to obey its laws globally, but expect its own citizens to be able to ignore those of other countries.
Nope. If you're going to say "such and such isn't a packaging system unless it has x-irrelevent-but-useful-to-me-feature" then you should at least justify its usefulness. Arguing that a package management system must have the capability to check dependencies, even if it doesn't in any way make use of that information, is adding a pointless barrier to entry.
Archives. And the level of management is doubtful
Collections of files including post-install scripts. Happy now? And the management is at least management - you can add a package, you can remove a named package, which is pretty much impossible to do unless you're "managing" in some sense.
By the common definition downloading dependencies is not part of a packaging system. By common definition discovring and recording those dependencies is. Neither Red Hat or Debian or Solaris packaging systems (nor any other I know of) include the ability to automatically download packages. Instead, higher levels tools like up2date, APT, or pkg-get perform these functions. However, the packages in each contain dependency information, and dependencies must be met before software in installed, enforcing a well maintained and cohesive system.
Again this is meaningless. You're saying that something is not a packaging system because it doesn't include a feature, but you're arguing that it only has to implement that feature, not use it in any way shape or form, to be a packaging system.
This is crap, be honest. A packaging system is a thing to add and remove packages. That's it. That's the definition. Any dependency features, auto-download tools, etc, are just extras.
I assume you'd argue that a car isn't a car unless it has airconditioning? I live in Florida, and I pretty much wouldn't get a car without A/C, but I'm not idiot enough to claim that my requirements in a car define what a car is.
There is only one party that wants to get rid of all the unconstitutional anti-privacy anti-consumer anti-freedom laws
...together with, in all fairness, the pro-privacy, pro-consumer, pro-personal-freedom laws. I know you meant to say that, but I thought I'd state it explictly so people don't get the wrong idea.
The Libertarians are as opposed to the antitrust laws and laws against bad employers as they are anything else, and while they have a habit of wrapping it in "It'll only fail!" rhetoric, the truth is that these laws were brought in to solve problems, and America is a country as a result with relatively few big abuses by employers and relatively few areas that are completely monopolised.
Even in the computer industry, Microsoft's dominance extends to a major part of the software world but no further - no one company has a monopoly on the manufacture of PCs, for example, a situation that would probably be very different if IBM hadn't been harassed by antitrust authorities in the late seventies and most of the eighties.
There are a lot of things the LP platform stands for that I happen to agree with, but that's because I oppose a lot of what's happening in politics at the moment. It's very easy to produce a party that's anti-everything. It's very insincere however to run a party on that basis.
Ultimately, if you try to find out what the LP is for rather than simply against, you find the usual bunch of cretinous tax avoiders who feel that the society that brought them up, educated them, and made them into the people they are today, shouldn't get anything from them in return. Which is a shame, because a political party founded on the principles of personal freedom rather than fascistic survivalist bollocks might actually be supportable.
If an item does not state anyplace in the auction that it's "functional" or "in working order", you can assume it to be broken/malfunctioning. If you're not really sure, email the person and *ASK* before bidding!
Actually selling something that isn't functional without specifying that it's sold "as-is" or saying that it isn't functional is grounds for a refund (wording of the relevent laws in the UK is something like "not fit for the purpose for which they were sold" and the US "not of merchantable quality" or something like that.) If you claim that an ACME Corp 16G RAM ZOINK is an ACME Corp 16G RAM ZOINK it had better be capable of being plugged in to a ZOINK slot on a standard motherboard capable of receiving 16G RAM ZOINKs and work like any other.
No, he's not. The proponent has proposed that the hippy will come back with the argument that war is bad because innocent people will die, which implies that he's not concerned about the deaths, or violence against, the guilty.
There's a world of difference between hitting a person who has hit you, and dropping bombs on a nation where someone who has hit you resides. The former is a direct attack on a specific, guilty, individual. The latter is an attack that may hit the guilty, but is equally likely to hit the innocent.
That's why the stereotype pot-smoking long haired hippy left wing student [stereotype? moi?] which riles our redneck friend so much would, if he were to implement the views of the proponent, attack the wife and neighbours too.
That's the difference between a war and an arrest. Deal with it.
Salon gives you the option of letting you subscribe to its content in return for the removal of ads.
This is in start contrast to most "free" sites which ram ads down your throat regardless of whether you're prepared to fund the site some other way or not.
Bravo Salon. Brickbats to those who insist that content should always be advertiser funded - such as one site that's condemning Salon for its advertising practices right now...
...and what are the legitimate uses of box cutters for those without something they want to cut?
It's a daft question. There's nothing implictly wrong in having something to hide, most of us, those who are human and live normal lives, have many things we don't want in the wrong hands, such as our credit card numbers, for instance.
If I had to email my bank, and transfer confidential information that could be misused, or had to communicate with some group I wanted to trade with, again by email, and needed to pass on confidential information, I'd use PGP or not use email at all. I don't regard that as illegitimate.
This is wrong on two counts. The first is that the DMCA outlaws unauthorised attempts to bypass copy prevention mechanisms, regardless of intent of use. The second is that, and at this point I admit it's civil law territory, unlicensed players are violating several patents which are necessary to licence in order to offer access.
Otherwise we would see APEX, a long time staunch opponent of the way DVDs are being handled, and others churning out DVD players based on the now publically available CSS specs.
All of this applies to US law of course, but as we've seen with Johanssen being extradited, and the arrest of Dimtry, jurisdiction of this law agreed to by the representatives of the American people and consented to by no others, seems to be global.
Personally, I've bought several (region free, CSS free - checked well in advance of purchase from several sources) DVDs, a crap load of VCDs, and a few videos. I have never agreed to any licence, shrinkwrap or otherwise. I have paid for my own, personal, copy of these movies, and have all the rights to use it that the law allows. We don't say guns are licenced (in the US) because when you buy a gun, you can keep it in your house, everyone agrees it's "your gun", but you can't legally shoot someone with it. Why do we pretend that a copy of a book is licenced because we can keep a copy but we can't make copies for other people (normally)?
I have the same fair use rights on these movies as I do on books and magazines. Unfortunately, if I went out and bought CSS/Region crippled DVDs, I'd have problems with the law making use of my fair use rights.
A licence is something you agree to. If it's possible to buy something, and make full use of it, without ever agreeing to a licence, then no licence applies.
Focussing resources used for improvements to open source software on things we consider important, rather than things our opponents see as important, for themselves.
Reducing the funds available to opponents of open source by denying access to a free development arena and forcing them to rely on directly paid-for software.
It's funny how all the linux kids want open source to have mainstream acceptance, beat MS, and "take over the world", but aren't willing to let people just use it.
I want Linux to have mainstream acceptance. To beat MS? No, I don't care. Microsoft can continue to sell Windows and I'm quite happy for them to do so, just as long as I'm not forced to use it.
But this is an irrelevent point. If I develop software, and it goes on to save Pixar a buck or two, which increases Pixar's profits, who continue to fund the MPAA and ask them to keep up the good work on everything from preventing copulating nudes appearing in Stanley Kubrick films to campaigning vigourously against open source software, in what way has open source been helped? If Pixar, Disney, Paramount or whomever are "won over by Linux" because they can save a buck doing their animation or special effects using it, then why are they continuing to support a front organisation that claims, in court, that the open source movement is about removing copyrights from copyrighted material, and is essentially a band of pirates?
Movie studios aren't going to "live off the dregs" of open source, they'll just go with IRIX, Solaris or even Win2k.
Sure, they'll pay marginally more, but it's not as if money is a constraint for a studio.
And in what way is this a bad thing? They pay more, their profit margins are diminished by a few hundred thou, and their technical people are telling them that they could have saved a fortune in Win2K licences but for the fact that they're running a hate campaign against the very people that could have saved them that money.
Why is seemingly everyone in favour of the members of the MPAA having their cake and eating it?
If your company has one license of windows, they gave money to Microsoft. Microsoft lies, cheats, etc and guess what? You work for a company that works for microsoft (based off your original logic). Oops, you are evil.
No, it wasn't. *sigh* What is it about basic logic that turns certain people into gibbering idiots? My logic was pretty simple: If Hollywood's front group, the MPAA, an organisation that every Hollywood publisher is a member of, and has influence over, and an organisation which sets out to represent Hollywood, lobbies for evil laws and then for the most sickeningly evil implementation of them, and lies repeatedly about open source, and the aims of those cracking the CSS system, then Hollywood is responsible for that.
Microsoft does not represent, in any way, my employer. Microsoft does not lobby on my company's behalf. It does not prosecute groups of people on my employer's behalf. Only on planet Xerithane would your twisted logic match mine.
And since your company makes automotive parts, shall I blame you for the Firestone/Explorer incident? Even though you (and chances are your company, although I dont know) had nothing to do with it?
No, because Firestone/Explorer was hardly a deliberate conspiracy engineered by the automotive industry. You would, however, be right to boycott my employer as part of a wider boycott against the automotive industry if you found evidence of an industry wide price fixing cartel, or if the industry decided to switch to putting hydrochloric acid in gasoline to reduce the lives of engines. Indeed, you'd be right to boycott our customers as a group if you found my employer was going around suing car dealers who sold cars with openable hoods on the industry's behalf.
When Universal Studios does something bad, boycott Universal. When the MPAA does something bad, boycott the MPAA - boycott Hollywood. That's what the MPAA is.
Now.. yes, they may get money from a source that is in opposition to the open source movement but guess what? If you work for a company so do you.
No, I don't. My employer is neutral on open source. It doesn't condemn its use. It doesn't lie to judges and congressmen about the subject. It doesn't lobby for draconian laws to be passed against it. Simply using non-open source software does not constitute opposition to the open source movement: making use of the law to suppress open source projects that are no threat to your business certainly does.
They aren't in an employer/employee relationship. They are in a contract.
Oh wow. Huge difference. Silly me. I guess I don't work for the automotive industry then either, after all, my employer "only" has a contract with about 30-40 different automakers and provides goods and services solely aimed at automotive manufacturers. That doesn't constitute working for the automotive industry! Oh no! Not on planet Xerithane anyway.
Come on, you're waffling sophestry again. You know that someone that produces computer graphics systems for Hollywood movie makers is a part of that industry. I know it. Your good friends who worked on Antz knows it. They're working at the behest of Hollywood, to produce goods of Hollywood's own design, to be owned by Hollywood and eventually to profit Hollywood. What are you going to argue next, that George Lucas isn't part of Hollywood? Harrison Ford isn't part of it? "Hey, they're only actors, they're working from a contract!"
Which is precisely why I said we can't prevent them from using Linux.
What we can do is blackball those who'd work with Hollywood. This can be anything from removing them from mailing lists to ignoring or even hindering changes they'd want to make to applications and operating systems that are open source.
I don't want anything to do with the bastards. I would like to see others take a similar view. Let them live off the dregs of open source, not have the world of free software revolve around them.
No, it's not the same Hollywood. The one's against DVDs under linux are the MPAA. The one's who are going to/might use linux are the backend movie production people,
And the MPAA works for whom? And the backend movie production people work for whom? And since when did "merely being an employee" of some group make you not part of that group?
Of course it's the same f---ing Hollywood! You're not the only person engaging in this sophestry but that doesn't make it any less bizarre.
On the contrary, I'd love to see Linux help the movie industry out. Because if they do, then the movie industry might actually see how great linux is and be much more kind to us (the linux community) in general. The best way to get rid of an enemy is to make friends with him, not through force and violence.
Nobody's suggesting force and violence. That doesn't mean we should help them out. This is providing something for nothing in return - indeed, it's going to the very extreme, taking the schoolyard bully who's just given you a bloody nose and offering to clean his shoes for him.
Also please try to keep in mind that Hollywood and the movie industry contains two types of people, lawyers, and not lawyers. So please just be mad at the MPAA, not whole damn industry.
The MPAA is an organisation that represents movie publishers, which in turn represents the interests of producers and other people involved in the movie making chain. It is, like it or not, the legitimate voice of Hollywood. There are many individuals in Hollywood, some of whom may agree with us, some of whom wont, but as an entity, it's a slimy outfit that speaks with one voice: Let those who'd wish to do things other than the way we demand be subject to the most extreme abuses. Thanks to the laws the MPAA has been instrumental in proposing, we've seen people extradited, others imprisoned, others still pending imprisonment, and others silenced through threats of imprisonment. And for what purpose? To prevent someone from copying a movie, regardless of intent, whether it's to distribute across the world, or to copy from a DVD to a computer screen on an operating system nobody has a licence for.
This is a pretty extremist and evil group. And you want us to go to bed with them. What a sick and twisted world.
There are mainstream efforts to create Linux DVD players by companies who have licensed the format.
Using what definition of "mainstream"? I was extremely deliberate in using the term. Producing closed source, pay-per-copy/pay-per-use software under Linux, is hardly "mainstream" in the Linux software world. And it's especially not "mainstream" to produce software for Linux that is not only both closed source and payware, but is intended solely for use on custom devices, rather than generic PCs.
I am not aware of anyone producing a licenced DVD player for Linux that is open source, that is free, or for general PCs. All the efforts to produce open source DVD players for Linux are unlicenced, and it's been made pretty clear (such as by actually having Johanssen extradited to the USA, and by Valenti lying in a submission to Kaplan's already biased court, about the nature of the open source movement) that Hollywood is 100% opposed to such developments.
Secondly, the people who hold the copyrights to those movies are NOT the same people that create the special effects. People get hired to do the special effects for films, which they do either for a flat fee or a cut of the profits or some combination thereof. They don't make any decisions about distributing the movie and leave that up to the distributors.
Of course they're the same entity! Arguing that one group is nothing to do with the other because the only relationship they have is that one pays the other, tells the other what to do, and owns the results, is an absurd argument. This is a straight employer/employee relationship, and the people who own the copyrights and fund open source bashing lawyering are the people benefiting from open source, just as my employer benefits from web technology even though he never touches the stuff and it is merely me, a humble employee, who puts his web applications together that he can sell to other people.
This is the same hollywood that's absolutely 100% against any mainstream efforts to allow Linux users to watch DVDs, because of an obsession with protecting the long term copyrights of movies that, normally, are profitable within two years of the scriptwriter tapping out the first line? (A profitability unheard of in virtually any other industry, where it's rare that a company is making more than it spends within 3 years of opening, and even longer to return the initial investment.)
Don't get me wrong. I'm not in favour of copyright infringement, but the notion that it should be illegal to watch Dr Strangelove on a Linux box because movie makers are obsessed that someone might use knowledge gained from the movie playing software to make a copy of the film, is absurd in the extreme.
I don't want to see Linux helping an industry that is so negative about open source and ideologically committed to its destruction. I don't want to see Linux helping an industry that lobbied for laws that effectively put the major art form of the 20th Century behind an electronic curtain leading to a situation where we may even lose much of what's important by the end of the 21st. An industry that has consistantly lied, even in court, about the motives of those wanting to break the encryption, and whose products appear to be increasingly designed to prevent consumers having any control or rights whatsoever of things they've paid money for.
I can't prevent it from happening, that's what a free operating system is all about after all, but I can say that those who help Hollywood in this fight and provide open source solutions to them, are a bunch of slimeballs, and insofar as we have a community, they should be blackballed from it.
Sorry, strongly expressed I know, but it's something I feel particularly angry about.
Except that's not true. Most politicians supported the Communications & Decency Act for example - otherwise it would never have been passed. It's somewhat fortunate that the first ammendment trumped it.
Indeed, Bush himself said during his election campaign that "There should be limits to freedom" in relation to a parody website done about him.
Unfortunately, and it remains a scary part of democracy, it's very easy to persuade people that things they "don't like" should be banned. A good politician (sadly rarely a successful politician) is one who recognises the values of his or her constituents and works to represent them, but doesn't blindly follow the solutions they support or propose simple solutions to complex issues.
Sadly, it's rare to come across a good politician these days. Most will follow the party line, and suggest simplistic solutions that they know will play well with the target audience. Don't like murderers? We'll have a death penalty. Don't want your friends to end up addicted to drugs? We'll "ban" them and have a war on drugs. Don't want to come across pictures of people having sex on the world wide web? We'll make it illegal! Meanwhile, justice and commonsense fall by the wayside.
I think the point is that the recording has to be open - known to the people being recorded, there's no requirement it be consensual.
It's more "Excuse me officer, but before you remove your baton, I'd just like you to know you're being recorded. Touch me and it'll be on FOX's "When Cops Beat Motorists" tomorrow.
This, perhaps, is one of those cases where the great marketing adage really does applies: "It's better to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission." --
Yes, it was:
In other words, the odds were not, in the absense of all other evidence, 1:50,000 against Larry murdering Curly, the odds were actually 100:1 that he didn't do it.
You however quoted:
He said: No evidence exists except a suspicion on the part of the police and a hair on the knife used to kill Curly.
A suspicion is not evidence (though I misworded the above in such a way that it made it look like I thought it was - but obviously I don't!) The suspicion could have to do with anything - he, Moe, and Curly were seen together regularly, and Moe was out of town on the day of the murder. This isn't evidence of murderous intent, it's just a connection that police might follow up.
As I said, the match wasn't how they found Larry. Whether or not is was significant enough to stand up in court, they had some reason to check Larry's DNA. I believe in our justice system they must have some reason before they can do that.
I've heard of cases where the DNA of everyone (or everyone matching a particular class (ie all males, etc) in a particular area has been checked when the police have exhausted all other possible ways of getting evidence. The checks are, of course, voluntary. In Larry's case, he may well have known the police suspected him, and therefore voluntarily given a DNA sample believing it would clear him.
Ultimately there needs to be evidence that strongly suggests that of the 100 people in LA with the same DNA, Larry was likely to have done it. In the hypothetical case proposed above, there is no such evidence... --
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Hurd is a completely ground-up new design. It's not a Unix or Unix-like kernel, though it does provide those services.
Hurd is (currently) built on top of Mach and provides the major operating system services you'd expect in a POSIX-like kernel. Mach is a microkernel and doesn't provide any (well, doesn't provide many) of this kind of thing itself. It acts as a kind of supporting frame for the processes that do the real work.
So, if you modify an X-Box so it is no longer operationally equivalent, but runs Linux instead, does it become an Ex-X-box?
And if you install a GUI on your Linuxified X-Box, does it become an X-Ex-X-Box?
And if you then use your GUIified Linuxified X-Box for surfing adult web sites, does it become an XXX-X-Ex-X-Box?
My employer got me one of these (a LapStation 95CE, which has a similar spec to what you're describing (2000XP?) but with a smaller hard disk and a maximum of 96M of RAM. It came with RedHat 4.3 installed) Don't use the 1600x1200 mode on the screen as it uses some stupid vibrating thing to achieve the effect, and it's ugly and causes eye strain.
You're right that the damned things are rugged. I've lost count of the number of times I've dropped mine, on one occasion on the hard concrete floor of the parking garage, and it still works perfectly. The thumbwheels mouse is quite easy to use once you get the hang of it.
I wouldn't recommend it though. The screen is too small unless you use the vibrating thing, there's almost no expansion potential, and the odd shape makes it difficult to fit in a briefcase or hold under your arm.
Seems remarkably expensive for a machine that apparently runs at 10% of the speed of a low end Wintel system. (Yes, I know StrongARMs are fast, but they're not THAT fast, an 800MHz Cerelon will eat 10 60MHz such CPUs for breakfast. A laptop with the former is generally sub $1000 today, whereas this TBA laptop is going to be nearer the $2000 mark)
(Which I think is a shame, I'd like to see a few non-Wintel systems out there that compete effectively like we had in the late eighties, but right now it looks like it's Apple and that's about it. Sun has a nice $1050ish desktop but no laptops to speak of. *sigh* Come back Commodore, Atari, all is forgiven....)
Yes, they do understand that. That's why Yahoo are in trouble.
That's not up to the French courts. Just as in the US, there's a seperation of powers in France - indeed in most democratic countries. The courts do not make the laws. The French government does.
For now, if Yahoo wants to operate in France or if its executive employees want to visit any country where France can "get them", they'd better obey French law, however outrageously unfair that is.
Someone ought to tell the US to do the same thing.
There's two sides to this, a moral side and a legal side. As usual they're at odds with one another. The US court has moral right on its side, but it has absolutely no say over French law, its opinions are frankly irrelevent to French law, or French cases, except in the relatively small area of where the US government and French government has treaties allowing France to prosecute on US soil.
Sucks doesn't it?
That just means that the French cannot persue the case through the US courts.
If the French court chooses to levy a huge fine for non-compliance on the US side, and seizes Yahoo assets in France as payment, there's bugger all the US courts can do about it. If Yahoo continues to flout what the French court regards as the law, and the French court issues warrants for the arrest of Yahoo executives, then, yes, the US courts wont be used to extradite Yahoo execs, but European courts and those in countries with extradition treaties with France will be able to enforce this should these people ever leave the US.
I don't agree with the situation. But then, I didn't think it was fair when Dimtry was arrested for activities that are perfectly legal in his own country that were performed in his own country. It's entirely hypocritical for the US to expect citizens of other countries to obey its laws globally, but expect its own citizens to be able to ignore those of other countries.
Nope. If you're going to say "such and such isn't a packaging system unless it has x-irrelevent-but-useful-to-me-feature" then you should at least justify its usefulness. Arguing that a package management system must have the capability to check dependencies, even if it doesn't in any way make use of that information, is adding a pointless barrier to entry.
Collections of files including post-install scripts. Happy now? And the management is at least management - you can add a package, you can remove a named package, which is pretty much impossible to do unless you're "managing" in some sense.
Again this is meaningless. You're saying that something is not a packaging system because it doesn't include a feature, but you're arguing that it only has to implement that feature, not use it in any way shape or form, to be a packaging system.
This is crap, be honest. A packaging system is a thing to add and remove packages. That's it. That's the definition. Any dependency features, auto-download tools, etc, are just extras.
I assume you'd argue that a car isn't a car unless it has airconditioning? I live in Florida, and I pretty much wouldn't get a car without A/C, but I'm not idiot enough to claim that my requirements in a car define what a car is.
...together with, in all fairness, the pro-privacy, pro-consumer, pro-personal-freedom laws. I know you meant to say that, but I thought I'd state it explictly so people don't get the wrong idea.
The Libertarians are as opposed to the antitrust laws and laws against bad employers as they are anything else, and while they have a habit of wrapping it in "It'll only fail!" rhetoric, the truth is that these laws were brought in to solve problems, and America is a country as a result with relatively few big abuses by employers and relatively few areas that are completely monopolised.
Even in the computer industry, Microsoft's dominance extends to a major part of the software world but no further - no one company has a monopoly on the manufacture of PCs, for example, a situation that would probably be very different if IBM hadn't been harassed by antitrust authorities in the late seventies and most of the eighties.
There are a lot of things the LP platform stands for that I happen to agree with, but that's because I oppose a lot of what's happening in politics at the moment. It's very easy to produce a party that's anti-everything. It's very insincere however to run a party on that basis.
Ultimately, if you try to find out what the LP is for rather than simply against, you find the usual bunch of cretinous tax avoiders who feel that the society that brought them up, educated them, and made them into the people they are today, shouldn't get anything from them in return. Which is a shame, because a political party founded on the principles of personal freedom rather than fascistic survivalist bollocks might actually be supportable.
Actually selling something that isn't functional without specifying that it's sold "as-is" or saying that it isn't functional is grounds for a refund (wording of the relevent laws in the UK is something like "not fit for the purpose for which they were sold" and the US "not of merchantable quality" or something like that.) If you claim that an ACME Corp 16G RAM ZOINK is an ACME Corp 16G RAM ZOINK it had better be capable of being plugged in to a ZOINK slot on a standard motherboard capable of receiving 16G RAM ZOINKs and work like any other.
Other than that I agree with what you've written.
No, he's not. The proponent has proposed that the hippy will come back with the argument that war is bad because innocent people will die, which implies that he's not concerned about the deaths, or violence against, the guilty.
There's a world of difference between hitting a person who has hit you, and dropping bombs on a nation where someone who has hit you resides. The former is a direct attack on a specific, guilty, individual. The latter is an attack that may hit the guilty, but is equally likely to hit the innocent.
That's why the stereotype pot-smoking long haired hippy left wing student [stereotype? moi?] which riles our redneck friend so much would, if he were to implement the views of the proponent, attack the wife and neighbours too.
That's the difference between a war and an arrest. Deal with it.
Salon gives you the option of letting you subscribe to its content in return for the removal of ads.
This is in start contrast to most "free" sites which ram ads down your throat regardless of whether you're prepared to fund the site some other way or not.
Bravo Salon. Brickbats to those who insist that content should always be advertiser funded - such as one site that's condemning Salon for its advertising practices right now...
...and what are the legitimate uses of box cutters for those without something they want to cut?
It's a daft question. There's nothing implictly wrong in having something to hide, most of us, those who are human and live normal lives, have many things we don't want in the wrong hands, such as our credit card numbers, for instance.
If I had to email my bank, and transfer confidential information that could be misused, or had to communicate with some group I wanted to trade with, again by email, and needed to pass on confidential information, I'd use PGP or not use email at all. I don't regard that as illegitimate.
Otherwise we would see APEX, a long time staunch opponent of the way DVDs are being handled, and others churning out DVD players based on the now publically available CSS specs.
All of this applies to US law of course, but as we've seen with Johanssen being extradited, and the arrest of Dimtry, jurisdiction of this law agreed to by the representatives of the American people and consented to by no others, seems to be global.
I have the same fair use rights on these movies as I do on books and magazines. Unfortunately, if I went out and bought CSS/Region crippled DVDs, I'd have problems with the law making use of my fair use rights.
A licence is something you agree to. If it's possible to buy something, and make full use of it, without ever agreeing to a licence, then no licence applies.
But this is an irrelevent point. If I develop software, and it goes on to save Pixar a buck or two, which increases Pixar's profits, who continue to fund the MPAA and ask them to keep up the good work on everything from preventing copulating nudes appearing in Stanley Kubrick films to campaigning vigourously against open source software, in what way has open source been helped? If Pixar, Disney, Paramount or whomever are "won over by Linux" because they can save a buck doing their animation or special effects using it, then why are they continuing to support a front organisation that claims, in court, that the open source movement is about removing copyrights from copyrighted material, and is essentially a band of pirates?
And in what way is this a bad thing? They pay more, their profit margins are diminished by a few hundred thou, and their technical people are telling them that they could have saved a fortune in Win2K licences but for the fact that they're running a hate campaign against the very people that could have saved them that money.Why is seemingly everyone in favour of the members of the MPAA having their cake and eating it?
Microsoft does not represent, in any way, my employer. Microsoft does not lobby on my company's behalf. It does not prosecute groups of people on my employer's behalf. Only on planet Xerithane would your twisted logic match mine.
No, because Firestone/Explorer was hardly a deliberate conspiracy engineered by the automotive industry. You would, however, be right to boycott my employer as part of a wider boycott against the automotive industry if you found evidence of an industry wide price fixing cartel, or if the industry decided to switch to putting hydrochloric acid in gasoline to reduce the lives of engines. Indeed, you'd be right to boycott our customers as a group if you found my employer was going around suing car dealers who sold cars with openable hoods on the industry's behalf.When Universal Studios does something bad, boycott Universal. When the MPAA does something bad, boycott the MPAA - boycott Hollywood. That's what the MPAA is.
Come on, you're waffling sophestry again. You know that someone that produces computer graphics systems for Hollywood movie makers is a part of that industry. I know it. Your good friends who worked on Antz knows it. They're working at the behest of Hollywood, to produce goods of Hollywood's own design, to be owned by Hollywood and eventually to profit Hollywood. What are you going to argue next, that George Lucas isn't part of Hollywood? Harrison Ford isn't part of it? "Hey, they're only actors, they're working from a contract!"
What we can do is blackball those who'd work with Hollywood. This can be anything from removing them from mailing lists to ignoring or even hindering changes they'd want to make to applications and operating systems that are open source.
I don't want anything to do with the bastards. I would like to see others take a similar view. Let them live off the dregs of open source, not have the world of free software revolve around them.
Of course it's the same f---ing Hollywood! You're not the only person engaging in this sophestry but that doesn't make it any less bizarre.
Nobody's suggesting force and violence. That doesn't mean we should help them out. This is providing something for nothing in return - indeed, it's going to the very extreme, taking the schoolyard bully who's just given you a bloody nose and offering to clean his shoes for him. The MPAA is an organisation that represents movie publishers, which in turn represents the interests of producers and other people involved in the movie making chain. It is, like it or not, the legitimate voice of Hollywood. There are many individuals in Hollywood, some of whom may agree with us, some of whom wont, but as an entity, it's a slimy outfit that speaks with one voice: Let those who'd wish to do things other than the way we demand be subject to the most extreme abuses. Thanks to the laws the MPAA has been instrumental in proposing, we've seen people extradited, others imprisoned, others still pending imprisonment, and others silenced through threats of imprisonment. And for what purpose? To prevent someone from copying a movie, regardless of intent, whether it's to distribute across the world, or to copy from a DVD to a computer screen on an operating system nobody has a licence for.This is a pretty extremist and evil group. And you want us to go to bed with them. What a sick and twisted world.
I am not aware of anyone producing a licenced DVD player for Linux that is open source, that is free, or for general PCs. All the efforts to produce open source DVD players for Linux are unlicenced, and it's been made pretty clear (such as by actually having Johanssen extradited to the USA, and by Valenti lying in a submission to Kaplan's already biased court, about the nature of the open source movement) that Hollywood is 100% opposed to such developments.
Of course they're the same entity! Arguing that one group is nothing to do with the other because the only relationship they have is that one pays the other, tells the other what to do, and owns the results, is an absurd argument. This is a straight employer/employee relationship, and the people who own the copyrights and fund open source bashing lawyering are the people benefiting from open source, just as my employer benefits from web technology even though he never touches the stuff and it is merely me, a humble employee, who puts his web applications together that he can sell to other people.Don't get me wrong. I'm not in favour of copyright infringement, but the notion that it should be illegal to watch Dr Strangelove on a Linux box because movie makers are obsessed that someone might use knowledge gained from the movie playing software to make a copy of the film, is absurd in the extreme.
I don't want to see Linux helping an industry that is so negative about open source and ideologically committed to its destruction. I don't want to see Linux helping an industry that lobbied for laws that effectively put the major art form of the 20th Century behind an electronic curtain leading to a situation where we may even lose much of what's important by the end of the 21st. An industry that has consistantly lied, even in court, about the motives of those wanting to break the encryption, and whose products appear to be increasingly designed to prevent consumers having any control or rights whatsoever of things they've paid money for.
I can't prevent it from happening, that's what a free operating system is all about after all, but I can say that those who help Hollywood in this fight and provide open source solutions to them, are a bunch of slimeballs, and insofar as we have a community, they should be blackballed from it.
Sorry, strongly expressed I know, but it's something I feel particularly angry about.
Indeed, Bush himself said during his election campaign that "There should be limits to freedom" in relation to a parody website done about him.
Unfortunately, and it remains a scary part of democracy, it's very easy to persuade people that things they "don't like" should be banned. A good politician (sadly rarely a successful politician) is one who recognises the values of his or her constituents and works to represent them, but doesn't blindly follow the solutions they support or propose simple solutions to complex issues.
Sadly, it's rare to come across a good politician these days. Most will follow the party line, and suggest simplistic solutions that they know will play well with the target audience. Don't like murderers? We'll have a death penalty. Don't want your friends to end up addicted to drugs? We'll "ban" them and have a war on drugs. Don't want to come across pictures of people having sex on the world wide web? We'll make it illegal! Meanwhile, justice and commonsense fall by the wayside.
I blame the parents...
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It's more "Excuse me officer, but before you remove your baton, I'd just like you to know you're being recorded. Touch me and it'll be on FOX's "When Cops Beat Motorists" tomorrow.
This, perhaps, is one of those cases where the great marketing adage really does applies: "It's better to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission."
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Ultimately there needs to be evidence that strongly suggests that of the 100 people in LA with the same DNA, Larry was likely to have done it. In the hypothetical case proposed above, there is no such evidence...
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