I've always found it to be very strange when people talk about wanting to protect children from certain kinds of things, like porn for example, or violent movies, or "bad" words especially. When I was growing up I never could figure out exactly what it was that I was being protected from. I did of course see and hear everything that I was supposed to be shielded from. Since I'm a human being and not a walking tape recorder I was no more affected by it than an older person would be.
Now that I'm in my 30's I've come to realize that the motivation that drives parents and society itself to engage in information control and censorship is not that any young people will be harmed by the things we hide from them, but that we are somehow uncomfortable with the idea of them seeing certain things. The whole protection bit is just a post-hoc justification.
The truth is that surfing the web is about as safe an activity as can be imagined. The real dangers lie outside in the real world, not in cyberspace. Now to be fair there are predators online, both sexual and financial. But if you haven't seen to it that your kid is street smart enough to identify and avoid them then you're just a piss-poor parent.
If you feel uncomfortable about the idea that your children might see certain things online then maybe you should investigate why you feel that way, because it sure as hell isn't because they're going to be damaged in some way from seeing it. A person would have to be force-fed something on a continual basis for an extended period for it to have an effect upon them.
Young people are human beings, not tape recorders and not pets with the power of speech. Their view of the world is formed from the conclusions they reach based upon the sum total of their experiences. The only real difference is in how much experience they have to draw from. By the time they are old enough to know how to use a computer, the basic nature of who they are is already in place. By the time they're teenagers they're basically as grown as someone can be without having been out on their own. There is not special transformation which takes place on the eve of their 18th (or 21st, or you name it) birthday whereby they are suddenly transformed from being an malleable infant into a mature adult.
I'm starting to ramble here. Really what I'm trying to say is that there isn't anything you need to protect your children from seeing or hearing because none of it is going to affect them in any special way. Also it isn't like you can protect them from the things you don't want them to find out about unless you lock them in a closet, and if you think that is a good idea please get psychiatric help soon.
Childhood is more of a cultural construct than anything else, at least how childhood is understood in our culture. The lies and deceit that children have to deal with is nothing short of criminal. I don't know about you, but I didn't much like being lied to when I was a kid. What made it worse is that the lies that are told are so pathetically transparent that I'm amazed anyone is fooled. I kept thinking that there must be something I was missing, some piece in the puzzle that would make the things I was being told make sense. It wasn't until I realized that most people were idiots that I understood that the way children are treated is simply an extension of that stupidity.
If people REALLY need some sort of automated update feature I'll throw out the home-grown update scripts that we use at ASU, even if they are an ugly hack because I'd never written a shell script of any kind when I started.
The truth is that anyone who knows how to mount an NFS share and run rpm -F can update their system provided that they have updates to work from, which are themselves easy to obtain from lots of mirrors using wget. Throw this together into a shell script and you've got the basis for what we do here. Now having to compile the updates from SRPMs does add in an extra wrinkle, but hardly one that is unsurmountable. Automating the process of keeping track of new SRPM entries into a directory and compiling them into deployable packages is as easy as pie, provided the SRPM compiles properly. In my experience with the Itanium version of AW2.1 most of them do. Those that don't I'll have to play with but then that is what I get paid for.
So in other words if I never buy a copy of RH but procure it in some other way then I am not bound by the terms of the support contract since I never agreed to it?
I'm no lawywer but it sure sounds that way to me.
I'm also sure that there are provisions in their contract preventing you from redistributing the distro, but once again if I don't buy a copy then I'm not bound by that contract in that regard either. Of course that still leaves the non-opensource OS components, but I'm sure I can extract them from the system by simply looking at the license tag for the RPMs and removing those packages that are proprietary.
It sounds to me like they are attempting to use contract law to force you to forfeit your rights under the GPL. Of course one could make a VERY strong argument that they themselves have violated the GPL in making such an attempt and have therefore forfeited the right to redistribute the GPL'd components of their operating system that they didn't wholly create themselves. I'm suprised I haven't heard people screaming like banshees about this by now. I guess with SCO being world-class bastards stuff like this doesn't get as much attention.
If they want to sell a support contract for $149 then more power to them. But if they think they are going to force me to nullify my rights under the GPL in the process then they really need to take the needle out of their arm.
If they don't change their tune then they can expect me and anyone I can influence at the 4th largest university in the country to tell them to go jump.
Ok so Redhat is charging $149 for their spiffy new version of Linux. Fine. Unlike some I'm not under the influence of mind-altering ideologies. But that doesn't mean that I want to pay $149 for EVERY system I install it on. I'm THE Linux support for ASU's Fulton school of engineering, and we've got almost two hundred systems (that I know of) running one version of Linux or another. I'm the person who has to keep these systems running, and that means it's my job to keep them up to date and make sure they're running a version of Linux that we can expect to see vendor supplied patches and security fixes for. Lets just say I'm not happy about the fact that after the end of the year I'll have to create my own update RPM's whenever a remote vulnerability is found in some package or another. And now I find that even updates to RH 9 are going to end in April of 2004. What does this mean for the school? Either we move over to the new enterprise version, or we start looking real hard at Mandrake, SuSe, etc.
Which brings me back to my original question. Does anyone know if there are non-GPL'd components included in the new Enterprise version and if so what they are? I'm not going to go around installing proprietary for $$$$ software on people's system illegally, and I'm not going to be able to ask them to pony up $149 per copy when the copy of Redhat the system is already running didn't cost them a dime. So if anyone knows anything, even rumors, I'd really like to know. If I can surgically remove the proprietary components from the system I will as long as they are not critical to its operation. Of course if Redhat is simply charging $149 for the service of being able to download their distro and aren't looking to prevent you from installing it on as many systems as you'd like (sans support obviously), then I'll be more than happy to pay the money to get those ISO images. I've never contacted them for support yet, so why should I need to start?
I really don't understand how this is even newsworthy to anyone who doesn't have a wooden leg, a patch over one eye, and a parrot on his shoulder squawking "Free Kevin!" morning, noon, and night.
I have no reason to give a rat's ass whether the movie industry sends out screeners or not. I'm neither a filmmaker nor am I someone who reviews films for award consideration. I'm not alone in this. Virtually NO ONE here falls into those two catagories, which leaves the third group with a reason to care, pirates. Is slashdot going to change its motto to "News for thieves. Stuff that will get you 5-to-10?"
The fact that this is somehow news here is really sickening. Its almost like reading a story about how burglars are unhappy because homeowners have been arming themselves with even bigger shotguns and are being pickier about who they allow into their home.
Sounds to me like we need some more chlorine in Slashdot's gene pool.
I'm personally glad that ports to things like vaxen and 68k macintoys are dying. Why waste time maintaining code for systems that are the computer equivalent of a beta VCR?
If you ask me, and I'm going to tell you even if you don't, software should be developed for the platforms that people are actually using, and not for platforms that are long-dead or clearly terminally ill.
A couple of years ago I was given a Quadra 700 for free and I decided to see if I could turn it into a real computer by putting some sort of Unix on it. I was able to install NetBSD 1.4.2 and 1.5 on it but quickly realized that the system was so slow as to be completely unusable. I was also unpleasantly suprised to discover that 1.5 was far slower than 1.4.2. Well, maybe not suprised, but certainly disappointed. I don't even want to think about how slow that 25Mhz 68040 would be under NetBSD 1.6.1 or NetBSD-current.
So when I see that OpenBSD is supposed to work on platforms like the VAX or the hp300, the first question that I ask is WHY? Why waste your time writing code that no one is going to run other than you and maybe a literal handful of other tinkerers? I think that OS projects like OpenBSD should drop support for everything but x86, alpha (at least till it really is dead), sparc, IA-64, x86-64, power-pc and whatever embedded processors are worthwhile (ARM/x-scale comes to mind). Anything else is either dead, dying, or such an obscure niche product that it doesn't matter.
Of course I can't tell people what to work on or what code to write. I just hope that those who do write code for dead systems are doing it for the entertainment/educational value alone, and not because they think anyone out there is actually going to use the code.
"There has been a wealth of research to show that children's brains process these video games in a different way from adults'. They cannot differentiate between fantasy and reality, so they play these games and then think if they do the same thing in reality, it's OK, there will be no consequences."
The problem with the above statement, made by Jack Thompson, attorney for the families, is that we're not talking about children here. At 14 and 16, the perpetrators of this crime are not children. Now I know that some people try to pretend that teenagers are children but they're really being dishonest and even deceitful when they do. Teenagers are not yet adults, but neither are they children. They are minors, but all that describes is their legal status, not their degree of maturity. Neither an 18 year old nor a 40 year old are minors, yet no one would try to claim that made them equally mature. The two young men in question are not children, they are adolescents, a stage in human development that is not usually given its due. For this lawywer to claim that someone that age is unable to discern reality from fantasy or understand the consequences of his or her actions shows a careless disregard for the truth or perhaps even an inability on the part of this lawyer to discern reality himself.
The left wing in this country have suceeded in creating an environment where no one is held accountable for the consequences of their decisions. The lamest of excuses, like "I saw it in a video game," or "I ate too many twinkies" are sucessfully used to deflect blame onto third parties.
Responsibility for this crime begins and ends with the two young men who perpetrated it. As far as the things that might have influenced them to commit the crime, why aren't their parents pointed out? If a video game can influence someone to do something so horrible, what does that say about how their parents have raised them?
The sad sick truth of this story is that Sony is being sued not because it is responsible for this in any way, but because it has deep pockets and is likely to settle out of court because it will cost them MORE money to fight it.
The only people who win in a case like this are lawywers, and they do so at the expense of society itself. Jack Thompson should be disbarred for filing a frivilous lawsuit.
Lee
Re:Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervt
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UK RIP Bill Reintroduced
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Ten years ago I wouldn't have been able to read anything you wrote without great difficulty. Back then everything I read was written by someone with a reasonable grasp of things like spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Then came the internet. Early on things were still good. Six or seven years ago the only people who had computers were those with decent IQ's. Even if someone's spelling was not all that great at least they had something worthwhile to say. Good grammar and punctuation can do a lot to compensate for bad spelling. You also didn't have a bunch of 3rd world yahoos whose command of the english language was so bad that the their posts in "engrish" could have passed for the non sequitur ramblings of someone suffering from schizophrenia. Now I know that not everyone is lucky enough to speak english as a first language, but surely there must be places online where people can post in a language they do have a grasp of. Even so I am more than willing to cut someone a great deal of slack if it is clear that they are trying to learn the language. You have to start somewhere after all. What REALLY drives me up the wall are posts from ignorant idiots who lack the language skills expected of the average sixth grader. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those grammar nazi's who will complain of split infinitives or other semi-obscure points of usage. I'm talking about the kind of posts that would make Forrest Gump blush. I'm sure we've all seen posts that seem to be nothing but one long run-on sentence without any punctuation or capitalization to tell us otherwise. Even worse than the format is the content of such posts. All I can say is that inbreeding is alive and well in North America.
As a result of the onslaught of these kinds of posts, I've developed the ability to decrypt and interpret things that no one who isn't a paid code-breaker should ever have to.
I don't see the situation getting any better. Americans pour money into our schools like it is going out of style. Some people take advantage of their educational opportunities and some people don't. For those who don't our efforts are essentially wasted. The most we can hope to achieve in sending them to school is keeping them off the street.
Lots of people here seem to be asking whether this is a "good" idea or not, and weighing the pros and cons of it. They're completely missing the point. The real question here is, what kind of a nation gives its government the power to do such a thing in the first place? That government which governs least governs best. Schemes such as this one are clear evidence that the British government has ceased to be the servant of its people and has become their master. The sickest part is that this inversion of power was not obtained through force but rather because the British people laid down their political power and now their rights are being slowly eroded as well. The next time some nitwit wants to ask me why I own guns and support the second amendment I'll use this as an example of the LEAST severe thing that can result. If you want examples of the MOST severe things, take a trip to North Korea or Cuba sometime. Democracy is that system of government where the people as a whole hold political power, and political power comes from the barrel of a gun. If guns didn't exist it would come from the edge of a sword. The ability to exert force is the only real power there is in the world. All other forms of power are simply layers of abstraction laid down on top. So if the day ever comes to pass where you're spied upon by your own government that is supposed to be subservient to you, and you wonder to yourself how this came to be, look no further than the day you let yourself be disempowered by your future rulers.
In short, ideas like this one have the audacity to escape the lips of british policymakers for the simple reason that the british people have pissed away their political power. If they know what is good for them they'll pull their heads out of their asses and work on winning it back.
From the graphing functions to its statistical capabilities, I consider Gnumeric to be on part with Gimp itself as an example of the quality that the Open Source model can create.
Any idea whether there is a windows version? Now that would be a good idea. I don't know why there isn't more work Open Source development being done for windows. How about giving Microsoft their own taste of "embrace and extend" by using Open Source on Windows as a means of reaching those who aren't likely or able to move over to Linux? I for one was VERY glad to see that Gimp had been ported to windows. I kept getting asked by windows users if there was a good alternative to Photoshop and now I can finally say yes without qualifying my answer with "but it only runs on Unix."
Microsoft isn't nearly as afraid of Linux as it is of the Open Source / Free Software movement/model itself. The technical quality of Microsoft's products is often lackluster, but when it comes to business strategy its leaders are grand-masters. They'll bankrupt you using an inferior product nine times out of ten. So far open source products like Linux have frustrated their ambitions to move up into the enterprise server arena but that isn't the same as going after them in their own backyard. Linux CAN be every bit as useful as a desktop OS as anything Microsoft or Apple has to offer, but it isn't quite there yet. Soccer moms and secretaries simply aren't going to move over to Linux because it isn't what their computers ship with and it isn't what everyone else is using. It also requires a degree of technical acumen that almost no-one posesses. The same is true of Windows of course, but that doesn't work against it since it's already in the dominant position. Those of use who do posess skill and talent with computers often forget just how mysterious the things that seem obvious to us are to most people. That is why Linux is stuck in the server room and will be for the forseeable future. If we can't displace Windows on the desktop, why not use it against its masters? Imagine if all the open-source application work that has been done for Unix was targeted at windows as well? Everyone who owned a computer would be using open source software in some capacity, and many would be aware of it. This would make it much easier to move people off of windows onto something better.
Before this movement to something better can occur however Linux needs to be made more luser friendly. Before you can sell something to someone you have to show how it is better than what they are already using and how what they are using is detrimental to them in some way that the replacement is not. Just making a better mousetrap isn't good enough when your potential customers have already invested in another model. Your mousetrap has to kill more mice AND include a feature whereby human fingers will never be smashed by it accidentally. Right now Linux is comparable to Windows as a desktop os in most ways. It needs to be better than windows and not plagued by the problems that windows is burdened with, or at least those problems that end-user clueless types consider to be important. Creating end-user apps for the platform where our end-users are is the very best way I can think of to gain insight into what they consider to be important. By ignoring windows as a platform for open-source development we're only helping Microsoft keep the barrier to use of Open-Source products artificially high.
This is a serious question. The antics that SCO is now pulling sound exactly like what the cult of Scientology www.xenu.net does to attack those it doesn't like.
What I'm specifically talking about is this idea that IBM is covertly directing Redhat, Novell, etc. to go after SCO. The clincher for me was when McBride said that ESR was on IBM's payroll, that sounded like something that Heber Jentzsch might have said.
So, does the S in SCO stand for Scienology or are Mormons and Clams even more similar then I already believed?
Software licenses are the means that software companies have used to compensate for inherent weaknesses in our IP legislation. For example, no one needs a license to read a book, but making copies without authorization is illegal. Without creating licenses software companies would have a much harder time purusing those only crime was using software that somone else provided them a copy of. If software was as difficult to copy as printed works, I seriously doubt that software licenses would even exist, save perhaps on packages whose price was high enough to create enough incentive to encourage someone to overcome the difficulty of copying it.
That does not however mean that there is something special about computer software that creates the legal REQUIREMENT that it be accompanied by a license of some sort. Software that is not covered by a legally valid license should have the same legal status as printed works do.
I'm not a lawyer so I may not be correct about some of my details, but it doesn't take a lawyer to know that software licenses aren't a legal requirement when the person or entity with the legal right to be the licensor isn't exercising that right.
These students need to learn to stand up for themselves then. If someone is picking on you, hurt them. Pain is the only language some people understand, and they will work to cause you pain until you make doing so painful to them.
This reminds me of what I was repeatedly told as a child was the "correct" way to handle a bully: "Go tell the teacher." I flabbergasts me today to think that someone would tell their kid such a hurtful and disabling lie. Running to the teacher doesn't solve the problem. Beating the living shit out of the person who is picking on you does. Oh, it might get you into trouble, but such troubles are temporary compared to being hounded daily by someone because it amuses them.
I got my hands on a bunch of 20 Meg ST-225 drives that were bad and proceeded to mix and match defective mechanisms with defective boards. Got quite a few working drives from the effort. Did the same thing a couple of years later with some 40 Meg ST-251 drives. I had more trouble with the ST-251's because there are variation between the drives in terms of mechanism and logic boards. I still wound up with two working drives in the end though.
It really irks me how so much attention is being put on people for whom education is a waste of taxpayer's money.
The reason for this attention is the simple statistic that says high school graduates are better off than people who dropped out. The belief is that by keeping would-be dropouts in school their lives can also be improved. Unfortunately things just don't work that way. The reason why high-school graduates are better off has everything to do with their character and intelligence and virtually NOTHING to do with whether they have a high school diploma or not. These educators, in no small part because of their own need to feel important, have got the cause and effect reversed.
Spending time and energy trying to keep these people in school does nothing but worsen the educational environment for students who might actually stand to benefit from an education. The money would be better spent providing more challenging or comprehensive classes for gifted students since they are the ones who benefit the most from an education. Society itself has more to gain by investing in our best and brightest than it does from trying to rescue losers from their own self-destruction.
If only foolishness and stupidity were fatal, imagine how much better our gene pool would be.
If anyone is "offended" (gasp!!) by what I said they can kiss my irish ass.
My outrage WAS directed towards the upper management. Remember, I said suits and lawyers. The flunkies and phone monkeys I have no beef with, they're just trying to get a paycheck any way they can.
As for my comment being tantamount to bombing SLC, you really need to differentiate things that you're reading and hearing in present time from things you've heard other people say in the past.
In case you'll notice, I was talking about the creation of a VIDEO GAME, where greedy scumbags and their legal mercenaries could be terminated with extreme prejudice. If I had any actual plans or ideas about exterminating them for real, the last thing I'd do is come talk about it in a public forum. If hearing someone talk about such ideas is enough to create emotional distress for you well then thats just too bad.
Too bad real life isn't like the Sims where I could drop Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into SCO's headquarters with some sawed-off shotguns and enough ammo to level the alamo.
I'd love to see an open-source video game where you get to torture and/or kill SCO suits and especially their lawyers.
Now obviously I'm not suggesting or encouraging anyone to do anything illegal or violent, that would only make things far worse. Even so, a nice simulation of the carnage would sure fun.
So what exactly are you complaining about? We removed a mass murderer from power and made significant progress in preventing future terrorist attacks.
If there is anything that makes me sick, it is people who are so partisan in their politics that they attack anything that their political rivals do as evil, even when it is good, and defend anything those they are backing do, even when it is evil. If Al Gore had won and he'd been the one who ordered the invasion of Iraq I seriously doubt that most Democrats and other dyed in the wool lefties would be complaining one little bit. But when it's a Republican behind it they bitch to high heaven. The staged "outrage" seems less and less genuine every day, just like the right-wing "outrage" about Clinton's womanizing was obviously phony after a while.
If you want to complain about something that the Bush administration is doing, why don't you start here at home with the BS that Ashcroft and his crowd are trying to pull. Finding fault with Bush for winning a war and bringing the hope for freedom to a nation that has lived under a fiendish dictator for 30+ years isn't exactly the best way to convince anyone with a lick of common sense not to like the guy.
If someone were proposing that this continue to be developed as part of a commerical enterprise I'd tell them to take the needle out of their arm.
The point of projects like this one is to have fun and learn skills that can be used for endeavors that have a more practical use.
What better way to learn the ins and outs of a TCP/IP stack than to implement one? What better way to learn about an OS than to write one, even if it is on hardware thats somewhere between having a Bar Mitzvah and being old enough to vote?
I'm not familiar with the current legal status of the Minix source code, but I think it would be interesting to see a port of it to the IIgs. I don't have any illusions about such an effort yielding anything of practical use, I just think it would be cool. The x86 version of Minix will run on a PC/XT, a system whose processor lacks any sort of memory protection functionality, with 256k of memory and a single 360k floppy drive.
If an OS like contiki can be crafted for a C64, surely Minix or something like it can be made to work on the IIgs.
It sounds to me like there is evidence that crazy people do crazy things. Video games are just the latest in a long string of supposed causes of social problems. Everything from radio to rumble seats have been blamed for everything from alcoholism to unwed pregnancies.
The lesson to be learned here is that anytime some new social phenomena comes along that it will be blamed for pre-existing problems by people with no common sense, which is sadly the majority. This is why individual rights and freedoms are so important, because all of us need protection from the ignorant and stupid among us who would be more than happy to impose their views upon us.
Also if you actually sit down and look at the rate of violence among gamers you'll find that not only is there NO evidence for a cause and effect relationship between game-playing and violence, but it could easily be argued that games may PREVENT violence simply due to the fact that gamers are no more prone to it than anyone else. A couple of nutcases in Colorado 4 years ago and a trio of psychos someplace else today falls so far short of sufficient evidence of a link that any serious statistician or social scientist would probably throw their coffee at you in disgust if you were to suggest that a link existed.
Of course that doesn't stop hysterical soccer moms from seeing something that isn't there and ambitious attorneys from milking that hysterial for all its worth.
Its amazing that so many of us grow up to be well-rounded and competent adults judging by the insanity and stupidity that so many of us had to cope with as children and adolescents. My own mother was convinced that my seeing the dinosaurs on "Land of the Lost" was somehow harmful to me as a child, and that watchin the Three Stooges would make me want to hit my sister. Sadly this lack of good judgement is the rule and not the exception. As Dr. Evil likes to say.... "riiighhht...."
"Perhaps a better way to put it is. Food is being donated to the people, but often does not reach the people, but only the rich. (The seem to own all the weapons)."
You just made a very strong argument for the right of a free people to keep and bear arms. Imagine if everyone in these countries was sufficiently armed to protect themselves and their families. Most of the "bad apples" that those in power use to oppress everyone else would be dead pretty quickly. Innocent people would die as well of course, but then innocent people are dying in these places already.
Lee
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism)
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Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
The whole point of liberalism is freedom. Once upon a time freedom was "avant garde," but to suggest that means liberalism itself is about BEING avant garde is completely missing the point. Accepting ideas on the basis that the rest of society finds them crazy is a pretty good way to be wrong 95 times out of 100. There is a difference between a visionary and a loon and pursuing the "avant garde" is a good way to be the latter.
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative because the common use meaning of the word itself has been hijaked by far-left dipshits beginning in the 1960's. A liberal 100 years ago did not become the conservative of 80 years ago.
Adam Smith was a radical in his day because before he came along Merchantilism was the dominant economic theory. The fact that he was radical in his own time is not what makes him an example of classical liberalism. The ideas he put forth and theories he proposed are what do that.
The current "liberal" sub-culture in America is made up of the ideological descendents of a 5th column that was put in place and supported by the Soviet Union and its allies during the cold war. Almost none of the younger "liberals" know this, but the old hands know it very well. The communists in the 1950's got their orders from Moscow just as people like Tom Hayden got their marching orders from Hanoi in the 1960's and 70's. Today these subversive elements have infiltrated the Democratic party and more or less dominate it. Now that's not to say that the Republicans are any better, but they are the lesser of two evils more often than not.
Slashdot Mirror
The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
I've always found it to be very strange when people talk about wanting to protect children from certain kinds of things, like porn for example, or violent movies, or "bad" words especially. When I was growing up I never could figure out exactly what it was that I was being protected from. I did of course see and hear everything that I was supposed to be shielded from. Since I'm a human being and not a walking tape recorder I was no more affected by it than an older person would be.
Now that I'm in my 30's I've come to realize that the motivation that drives parents and society itself to engage in information control and censorship is not that any young people will be harmed by the things we hide from them, but that we are somehow uncomfortable with the idea of them seeing certain things. The whole protection bit is just a post-hoc justification.
The truth is that surfing the web is about as safe an activity as can be imagined. The real dangers lie outside in the real world, not in cyberspace. Now to be fair there are predators online, both sexual and financial. But if you haven't seen to it that your kid is street smart enough to identify and avoid them then you're just a piss-poor parent.
If you feel uncomfortable about the idea that your children might see certain things online then maybe you should investigate why you feel that way, because it sure as hell isn't because they're going to be damaged in some way from seeing it. A person would have to be force-fed something on a continual basis for an extended period for it to have an effect upon them.
Young people are human beings, not tape recorders and not pets with the power of speech. Their view of the world is formed from the conclusions they reach based upon the sum total of their experiences. The only real difference is in how much experience they have to draw from. By the time they are old enough to know how to use a computer, the basic nature of who they are is already in place. By the time they're teenagers they're basically as grown as someone can be without having been out on their own. There is not special transformation which takes place on the eve of their 18th (or 21st, or you name it) birthday whereby they are suddenly transformed from being an malleable infant into a mature adult.
I'm starting to ramble here. Really what I'm trying to say is that there isn't anything you need to protect your children from seeing or hearing because none of it is going to affect them in any special way. Also it isn't like you can protect them from the things you don't want them to find out about unless you lock them in a closet, and if you think that is a good idea please get psychiatric help soon.
Childhood is more of a cultural construct than anything else, at least how childhood is understood in our culture. The lies and deceit that children have to deal with is nothing short of criminal. I don't know about you, but I didn't much like being lied to when I was a kid. What made it worse is that the lies that are told are so pathetically transparent that I'm amazed anyone is fooled. I kept thinking that there must be something I was missing, some piece in the puzzle that would make the things I was being told make sense. It wasn't until I realized that most people were idiots that I understood that the way children are treated is simply an extension of that stupidity.
Lee
If people REALLY need some sort of automated update feature I'll throw out the home-grown update scripts that we use at ASU, even if they are an ugly hack because I'd never written a shell script of any kind when I started.
The truth is that anyone who knows how to mount an NFS share and run rpm -F can update their system provided that they have updates to work from, which are themselves easy to obtain from lots of mirrors using wget. Throw this together into a shell script and you've got the basis for what we do here. Now having to compile the updates from SRPMs does add in an extra wrinkle, but hardly one that is unsurmountable. Automating the process of keeping track of new SRPM entries into a directory and compiling them into deployable packages is as easy as pie, provided the SRPM compiles properly. In my experience with the Itanium version of AW2.1 most of them do. Those that don't I'll have to play with but then that is what I get paid for.
Lee
So in other words if I never buy a copy of RH but procure it in some other way then I am not bound by the terms of the support contract since I never agreed to it?
I'm no lawywer but it sure sounds that way to me.
I'm also sure that there are provisions in their contract preventing you from redistributing the distro, but once again if I don't buy a copy then I'm not bound by that contract in that regard either. Of course that still leaves the non-opensource OS components, but I'm sure I can extract them from the system by simply looking at the license tag for the RPMs and removing those packages that are proprietary.
It sounds to me like they are attempting to use contract law to force you to forfeit your rights under the GPL. Of course one could make a VERY strong argument that they themselves have violated the GPL in making such an attempt and have therefore forfeited the right to redistribute the GPL'd components of their operating system that they didn't wholly create themselves. I'm suprised I haven't heard people screaming like banshees about this by now. I guess with SCO being world-class bastards stuff like this doesn't get as much attention.
If they want to sell a support contract for $149 then more power to them. But if they think they are going to force me to nullify my rights under the GPL in the process then they really need to take the needle out of their arm.
If they don't change their tune then they can expect me and anyone I can influence at the 4th largest university in the country to tell them to go jump.
Lee
Ok so Redhat is charging $149 for their spiffy new version of Linux. Fine. Unlike some I'm not under the influence of mind-altering ideologies. But that doesn't mean that I want to pay $149 for EVERY system I install it on. I'm THE Linux support for ASU's Fulton school of engineering, and we've got almost two hundred systems (that I know of) running one version of Linux or another. I'm the person who has to keep these systems running, and that means it's my job to keep them up to date and make sure they're running a version of Linux that we can expect to see vendor supplied patches and security fixes for. Lets just say I'm not happy about the fact that after the end of the year I'll have to create my own update RPM's whenever a remote vulnerability is found in some package or another. And now I find that even updates to RH 9 are going to end in April of 2004. What does this mean for the school? Either we move over to the new enterprise version, or we start looking real hard at Mandrake, SuSe, etc.
Which brings me back to my original question. Does anyone know if there are non-GPL'd components included in the new Enterprise version and if so what they are? I'm not going to go around installing proprietary for $$$$ software on people's system illegally, and I'm not going to be able to ask them to pony up $149 per copy when the copy of Redhat the system is already running didn't cost them a dime. So if anyone knows anything, even rumors, I'd really like to know. If I can surgically remove the proprietary components from the system I will as long as they are not critical to its operation. Of course if Redhat is simply charging $149 for the service of being able to download their distro and aren't looking to prevent you from installing it on as many systems as you'd like (sans support obviously), then I'll be more than happy to pay the money to get those ISO images. I've never contacted them for support yet, so why should I need to start?
Lee
I really don't understand how this is even newsworthy to anyone who doesn't have a wooden leg, a patch over one eye, and a parrot on his shoulder squawking "Free Kevin!" morning, noon, and night.
I have no reason to give a rat's ass whether the movie industry sends out screeners or not. I'm neither a filmmaker nor am I someone who reviews films for award consideration. I'm not alone in this. Virtually NO ONE here falls into those two catagories, which leaves the third group with a reason to care, pirates. Is slashdot going to change its motto to "News for thieves. Stuff that will get you 5-to-10?"
The fact that this is somehow news here is really sickening. Its almost like reading a story about how burglars are unhappy because homeowners have been arming themselves with even bigger shotguns and are being pickier about who they allow into their home.
Sounds to me like we need some more chlorine in Slashdot's gene pool.
Hans
I'm personally glad that ports to things like vaxen and 68k macintoys are dying. Why waste time maintaining code for systems that are the computer equivalent of a beta VCR?
If you ask me, and I'm going to tell you even if you don't, software should be developed for the platforms that people are actually using, and not for platforms that are long-dead or clearly terminally ill.
A couple of years ago I was given a Quadra 700 for free and I decided to see if I could turn it into a real computer by putting some sort of Unix on it. I was able to install NetBSD 1.4.2 and 1.5 on it but quickly realized that the system was so slow as to be completely unusable. I was also unpleasantly suprised to discover that 1.5 was far slower than 1.4.2. Well, maybe not suprised, but certainly disappointed. I don't even want to think about how slow that 25Mhz 68040 would be under NetBSD 1.6.1 or NetBSD-current.
So when I see that OpenBSD is supposed to work on platforms like the VAX or the hp300, the first question that I ask is WHY? Why waste your time writing code that no one is going to run other than you and maybe a literal handful of other tinkerers? I think that OS projects like OpenBSD should drop support for everything but x86, alpha (at least till it really is dead), sparc, IA-64, x86-64, power-pc and whatever embedded processors are worthwhile (ARM/x-scale comes to mind). Anything else is either dead, dying, or such an obscure niche product that it doesn't matter.
Of course I can't tell people what to work on or what code to write. I just hope that those who do write code for dead systems are doing it for the entertainment/educational value alone, and not because they think anyone out there is actually going to use the code.
Lee
"There has been a wealth of research to show that children's brains process these video games in a different way from adults'. They cannot differentiate between fantasy and reality, so they play these games and then think if they do the same thing in reality, it's OK, there will be no consequences."
The problem with the above statement, made by Jack Thompson, attorney for the families, is that we're not talking about children here. At 14 and 16, the perpetrators of this crime are not children. Now I know that some people try to pretend that teenagers are children but they're really being dishonest and even deceitful when they do. Teenagers are not yet adults, but neither are they children. They are minors, but all that describes is their legal status, not their degree of maturity. Neither an 18 year old nor a 40 year old are minors, yet no one would try to claim that made them equally mature. The two young men in question are not children, they are adolescents, a stage in human development that is not usually given its due. For this lawywer to claim that someone that age is unable to discern reality from fantasy or understand the consequences of his or her actions shows a careless disregard for the truth or perhaps even an inability on the part of this lawyer to discern reality himself.
The left wing in this country have suceeded in creating an environment where no one is held accountable for the consequences of their decisions. The lamest of excuses, like "I saw it in a video game," or "I ate too many twinkies" are sucessfully used to deflect blame onto third parties.
Responsibility for this crime begins and ends with the two young men who perpetrated it. As far as the things that might have influenced them to commit the crime, why aren't their parents pointed out? If a video game can influence someone to do something so horrible, what does that say about how their parents have raised them?
The sad sick truth of this story is that Sony is being sued not because it is responsible for this in any way, but because it has deep pockets and is likely to settle out of court because it will cost them MORE money to fight it.
The only people who win in a case like this are lawywers, and they do so at the expense of society itself. Jack Thompson should be disbarred for filing a frivilous lawsuit.
Lee
Ten years ago I wouldn't have been able to read anything you wrote without great difficulty. Back then everything I read was written by someone with a reasonable grasp of things like spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Then came the internet. Early on things were still good. Six or seven years ago the only people who had computers were those with decent IQ's. Even if someone's spelling was not all that great at least they had something worthwhile to say. Good grammar and punctuation can do a lot to compensate for bad spelling. You also didn't have a bunch of 3rd world yahoos whose command of the english language was so bad that the their posts in "engrish" could have passed for the non sequitur ramblings of someone suffering from schizophrenia. Now I know that not everyone is lucky enough to speak english as a first language, but surely there must be places online where people can post in a language they do have a grasp of. Even so I am more than willing to cut someone a great deal of slack if it is clear that they are trying to learn the language. You have to start somewhere after all. What REALLY drives me up the wall are posts from ignorant idiots who lack the language skills expected of the average sixth grader. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those grammar nazi's who will complain of split infinitives or other semi-obscure points of usage. I'm talking about the kind of posts that would make Forrest Gump blush. I'm sure we've all seen posts that seem to be nothing but one long run-on sentence without any punctuation or capitalization to tell us otherwise. Even worse than the format is the content of such posts. All I can say is that inbreeding is alive and well in North America.
As a result of the onslaught of these kinds of posts, I've developed the ability to decrypt and interpret things that no one who isn't a paid code-breaker should ever have to.
I don't see the situation getting any better. Americans pour money into our schools like it is going out of style. Some people take advantage of their educational opportunities and some people don't. For those who don't our efforts are essentially wasted. The most we can hope to achieve in sending them to school is keeping them off the street.
Lee
Lots of people here seem to be asking whether this is a "good" idea or not, and weighing the pros and cons of it. They're completely missing the point. The real question here is, what kind of a nation gives its government the power to do such a thing in the first place? That government which governs least governs best. Schemes such as this one are clear evidence that the British government has ceased to be the servant of its people and has become their master. The sickest part is that this inversion of power was not obtained through force but rather because the British people laid down their political power and now their rights are being slowly eroded as well. The next time some nitwit wants to ask me why I own guns and support the second amendment I'll use this as an example of the LEAST severe thing that can result. If you want examples of the MOST severe things, take a trip to North Korea or Cuba sometime. Democracy is that system of government where the people as a whole hold political power, and political power comes from the barrel of a gun. If guns didn't exist it would come from the edge of a sword. The ability to exert force is the only real power there is in the world. All other forms of power are simply layers of abstraction laid down on top. So if the day ever comes to pass where you're spied upon by your own government that is supposed to be subservient to you, and you wonder to yourself how this came to be, look no further than the day you let yourself be disempowered by your future rulers.
In short, ideas like this one have the audacity to escape the lips of british policymakers for the simple reason that the british people have pissed away their political power. If they know what is good for them they'll pull their heads out of their asses and work on winning it back.
Lee
Its the default office suite in Linux because its the default in Redhat. You have to explicitly tell Redhat to install things like Gnumeric.
Lee
From the graphing functions to its statistical capabilities, I consider Gnumeric to be on part with Gimp itself as an example of the quality that the Open Source model can create.
Any idea whether there is a windows version? Now that would be a good idea. I don't know why there isn't more work Open Source development being done for windows. How about giving Microsoft their own taste of "embrace and extend" by using Open Source on Windows as a means of reaching those who aren't likely or able to move over to Linux? I for one was VERY glad to see that Gimp had been ported to windows. I kept getting asked by windows users if there was a good alternative to Photoshop and now I can finally say yes without qualifying my answer with "but it only runs on Unix."
Microsoft isn't nearly as afraid of Linux as it is of the Open Source / Free Software movement/model itself. The technical quality of Microsoft's products is often lackluster, but when it comes to business strategy its leaders are grand-masters. They'll bankrupt you using an inferior product nine times out of ten. So far open source products like Linux have frustrated their ambitions to move up into the enterprise server arena but that isn't the same as going after them in their own backyard. Linux CAN be every bit as useful as a desktop OS as anything Microsoft or Apple has to offer, but it isn't quite there yet. Soccer moms and secretaries simply aren't going to move over to Linux because it isn't what their computers ship with and it isn't what everyone else is using. It also requires a degree of technical acumen that almost no-one posesses. The same is true of Windows of course, but that doesn't work against it since it's already in the dominant position. Those of use who do posess skill and talent with computers often forget just how mysterious the things that seem obvious to us are to most people. That is why Linux is stuck in the server room and will be for the forseeable future. If we can't displace Windows on the desktop, why not use it against its masters? Imagine if all the open-source application work that has been done for Unix was targeted at windows as well? Everyone who owned a computer would be using open source software in some capacity, and many would be aware of it. This would make it much easier to move people off of windows onto something better.
Before this movement to something better can occur however Linux needs to be made more luser friendly. Before you can sell something to someone you have to show how it is better than what they are already using and how what they are using is detrimental to them in some way that the replacement is not. Just making a better mousetrap isn't good enough when your potential customers have already invested in another model. Your mousetrap has to kill more mice AND include a feature whereby human fingers will never be smashed by it accidentally. Right now Linux is comparable to Windows as a desktop os in most ways. It needs to be better than windows and not plagued by the problems that windows is burdened with, or at least those problems that end-user clueless types consider to be important. Creating end-user apps for the platform where our end-users are is the very best way I can think of to gain insight into what they consider to be important. By ignoring windows as a platform for open-source development we're only helping Microsoft keep the barrier to use of Open-Source products artificially high.
Lee
What I'm specifically talking about is this idea that IBM is covertly directing Redhat, Novell, etc. to go after SCO. The clincher for me was when McBride said that ESR was on IBM's payroll, that sounded like something that Heber Jentzsch might have said.
So, does the S in SCO stand for Scienology or are Mormons and Clams even more similar then I already believed?
Lee
Software licenses are the means that software companies have used to compensate for inherent weaknesses in our IP legislation. For example, no one needs a license to read a book, but making copies without authorization is illegal. Without creating licenses software companies would have a much harder time purusing those only crime was using software that somone else provided them a copy of. If software was as difficult to copy as printed works, I seriously doubt that software licenses would even exist, save perhaps on packages whose price was high enough to create enough incentive to encourage someone to overcome the difficulty of copying it.
That does not however mean that there is something special about computer software that creates the legal REQUIREMENT that it be accompanied by a license of some sort. Software that is not covered by a legally valid license should have the same legal status as printed works do.
I'm not a lawyer so I may not be correct about some of my details, but it doesn't take a lawyer to know that software licenses aren't a legal requirement when the person or entity with the legal right to be the licensor isn't exercising that right.
Lee
These students need to learn to stand up for themselves then. If someone is picking on you, hurt them. Pain is the only language some people understand, and they will work to cause you pain until you make doing so painful to them.
This reminds me of what I was repeatedly told as a child was the "correct" way to handle a bully: "Go tell the teacher." I flabbergasts me today to think that someone would tell their kid such a hurtful and disabling lie. Running to the teacher doesn't solve the problem. Beating the living shit out of the person who is picking on you does. Oh, it might get you into trouble, but such troubles are temporary compared to being hounded daily by someone because it amuses them.
I got my hands on a bunch of 20 Meg ST-225 drives that were bad and proceeded to mix and match defective mechanisms with defective boards. Got quite a few working drives from the effort. Did the same thing a couple of years later with some 40 Meg ST-251 drives. I had more trouble with the ST-251's because there are variation between the drives in terms of mechanism and logic boards. I still wound up with two working drives in the end though.
Lee
It really irks me how so much attention is being put on people for whom education is a waste of taxpayer's money.
The reason for this attention is the simple statistic that says high school graduates are better off than people who dropped out. The belief is that by keeping would-be dropouts in school their lives can also be improved. Unfortunately things just don't work that way. The reason why high-school graduates are better off has everything to do with their character and intelligence and virtually NOTHING to do with whether they have a high school diploma or not. These educators, in no small part because of their own need to feel important, have got the cause and effect reversed.
Spending time and energy trying to keep these people in school does nothing but worsen the educational environment for students who might actually stand to benefit from an education. The money would be better spent providing more challenging or comprehensive classes for gifted students since they are the ones who benefit the most from an education. Society itself has more to gain by investing in our best and brightest than it does from trying to rescue losers from their own self-destruction.
If only foolishness and stupidity were fatal, imagine how much better our gene pool would be.
Lee
If anyone is "offended" (gasp!!) by what I said they can kiss my irish ass.
My outrage WAS directed towards the upper management. Remember, I said suits and lawyers. The flunkies and phone monkeys I have no beef with, they're just trying to get a paycheck any way they can.
As for my comment being tantamount to bombing SLC, you really need to differentiate things that you're reading and hearing in present time from things you've heard other people say in the past.
In case you'll notice, I was talking about the creation of a VIDEO GAME, where greedy scumbags and their legal mercenaries could be terminated with extreme prejudice. If I had any actual plans or ideas about exterminating them for real, the last thing I'd do is come talk about it in a public forum. If hearing someone talk about such ideas is enough to create emotional distress for you well then thats just too bad.
Lee
Too bad real life isn't like the Sims where I could drop Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into SCO's headquarters with some sawed-off shotguns and enough ammo to level the alamo.
I'd love to see an open-source video game where you get to torture and/or kill SCO suits and especially their lawyers.
Now obviously I'm not suggesting or encouraging anyone to do anything illegal or violent, that would only make things far worse. Even so, a nice simulation of the carnage would sure fun.
Lee
So what exactly are you complaining about? We removed a mass murderer from power and made significant progress in preventing future terrorist attacks.
If there is anything that makes me sick, it is people who are so partisan in their politics that they attack anything that their political rivals do as evil, even when it is good, and defend anything those they are backing do, even when it is evil. If Al Gore had won and he'd been the one who ordered the invasion of Iraq I seriously doubt that most Democrats and other dyed in the wool lefties would be complaining one little bit. But when it's a Republican behind it they bitch to high heaven. The staged "outrage" seems less and less genuine every day, just like the right-wing "outrage" about Clinton's womanizing was obviously phony after a while.
If you want to complain about something that the Bush administration is doing, why don't you start here at home with the BS that Ashcroft and his crowd are trying to pull. Finding fault with Bush for winning a war and bringing the hope for freedom to a nation that has lived under a fiendish dictator for 30+ years isn't exactly the best way to convince anyone with a lick of common sense not to like the guy.
Lee
If someone were proposing that this continue to be developed as part of a commerical enterprise I'd tell them to take the needle out of their arm.
The point of projects like this one is to have fun and learn skills that can be used for endeavors that have a more practical use.
What better way to learn the ins and outs of a TCP/IP stack than to implement one? What better way to learn about an OS than to write one, even if it is on hardware thats somewhere between having a Bar Mitzvah and being old enough to vote?
Lee
I'm not familiar with the current legal status of the Minix source code, but I think it would be interesting to see a port of it to the IIgs. I don't have any illusions about such an effort yielding anything of practical use, I just think it would be cool. The x86 version of Minix will run on a PC/XT, a system whose processor lacks any sort of memory protection functionality, with 256k of memory and a single 360k floppy drive.
If an OS like contiki can be crafted for a C64, surely Minix or something like it can be made to work on the IIgs.
Lee
It sounds to me like there is evidence that crazy people do crazy things. Video games are just the latest in a long string of supposed causes of social problems. Everything from radio to rumble seats have been blamed for everything from alcoholism to unwed pregnancies.
The lesson to be learned here is that anytime some new social phenomena comes along that it will be blamed for pre-existing problems by people with no common sense, which is sadly the majority. This is why individual rights and freedoms are so important, because all of us need protection from the ignorant and stupid among us who would be more than happy to impose their views upon us.
Also if you actually sit down and look at the rate of violence among gamers you'll find that not only is there NO evidence for a cause and effect relationship between game-playing and violence, but it could easily be argued that games may PREVENT violence simply due to the fact that gamers are no more prone to it than anyone else. A couple of nutcases in Colorado 4 years ago and a trio of psychos someplace else today falls so far short of sufficient evidence of a link that any serious statistician or social scientist would probably throw their coffee at you in disgust if you were to suggest that a link existed.
Of course that doesn't stop hysterical soccer moms from seeing something that isn't there and ambitious attorneys from milking that hysterial for all its worth.
Its amazing that so many of us grow up to be well-rounded and competent adults judging by the insanity and stupidity that so many of us had to cope with as children and adolescents. My own mother was convinced that my seeing the dinosaurs on "Land of the Lost" was somehow harmful to me as a child, and that watchin the Three Stooges would make me want to hit my sister. Sadly this lack of good judgement is the rule and not the exception. As Dr. Evil likes to say.... "riiighhht...."
Lee
"Perhaps a better way to put it is. Food is being donated to the people, but often does not reach the people, but only the rich. (The seem to own all the weapons)."
You just made a very strong argument for the right of a free people to keep and bear arms. Imagine if everyone in these countries was sufficiently armed to protect themselves and their families. Most of the "bad apples" that those in power use to oppress everyone else would be dead pretty quickly. Innocent people would die as well of course, but then innocent people are dying in these places already.
Lee
The whole point of liberalism is freedom. Once upon a time freedom was "avant garde," but to suggest that means liberalism itself is about BEING avant garde is completely missing the point. Accepting ideas on the basis that the rest of society finds them crazy is a pretty good way to be wrong 95 times out of 100. There is a difference between a visionary and a loon and pursuing the "avant garde" is a good way to be the latter.
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative because the common use meaning of the word itself has been hijaked by far-left dipshits beginning in the 1960's. A liberal 100 years ago did not become the conservative of 80 years ago.
Adam Smith was a radical in his day because before he came along Merchantilism was the dominant economic theory. The fact that he was radical in his own time is not what makes him an example of classical liberalism. The ideas he put forth and theories he proposed are what do that.
The current "liberal" sub-culture in America is made up of the ideological descendents of a 5th column that was put in place and supported by the Soviet Union and its allies during the cold war. Almost none of the younger "liberals" know this, but the old hands know it very well. The communists in the 1950's got their orders from Moscow just as people like Tom Hayden got their marching orders from Hanoi in the 1960's and 70's. Today these subversive elements have infiltrated the Democratic party and more or less dominate it. Now that's not to say that the Republicans are any better, but they are the lesser of two evils more often than not.
Lee