Once again, RMS has turned something mundaine, such as reading your email, into a political statement. For 99.9999% of all people who use the computer the whole point of using the computer is so that they can do their job better. They don't make the decision about which software packages to buy. They don't make the decision about what format to use to save file. They don't know the difference between RTF and DOC formats. They couldn't read HTML if it reached out and bit them in the butt.
All they want to do is read their email and use their documents. If they have to forward it on to someone else then they just want to take the document and drop it in a letter and send it on. They don't want to have to deal with the complete and total hassle of opening the document and saving it off as some sort of Stallman approved attachment and then dropping that into an email attachment.
The whole point behind the computer age is that these machines are supposed to make our lives easier. I for one could care less who owns the format for Microsoft.DOC documents and, believe it or not, I'm not concerned about my older documents becoming unreadable. What Stallman forgets is that the format is as much a straight jacket for Microsoft as for anybody else. Sure you may or may not be able to read a ten year old document but I would bet that twenty years from now I will still be able to read documents I write this year. It's entirely possible that this will be true a hundred or even a thousand years from now.
The other possibility is that Microsoft obsoletes documents written more than seven or some years ago. This is, of course, nutty because Microsoft's customers would sue them into the poor house, or worse, just stop buying upgrades.
Think I'm wrong, take a look at how long it took for them to get ride of the 8086 stuff, and that was an idea everybody agreed on.
I understand Stallman's political point but what he is doing is guaranteeing that he never sees another email from someone who uses Word. His proposed solution is little more than taking a tiny sharp stick and digging it around in an open wound. Or worse, its just another rock in the shoe of life.
Want to make a political statement? Then ask why.NET adds a whole bunch of new key words to C++. You could also refuse to use a compiler built and sold by Microsoft. Write code that only works on Linux. Work on things that make computing better, not just more difficult.
News Bulletin: Rome, Italy
Allied forces suffered a serious setback today as an unexpected software opportunity caused the Fifth Armored Drone Division to target each other as opposed to the enemy. By the time he could stop the effort Colonel Alex "DarthMaulGuy" Smith, a sixteen year old Miami resident, was only able to save thirty drones.
"I would have saved more but my Mom kept calling me for dinner."
The President, Ronald Reagan (son of the late President of the same name), said "It would have been a disaster except the Chinese-India-Somalia coalition downloaded the plans for the drones from Microsoft's.NET website. It's a good thing they were so complete because the enemy hit the same software opportunity as us. They couldn't stop it though and they lost all but one of their drones.
General Smith, Promoted, said of this, "The Somalians asked me to fix it but Mom made Strawberry Shortcake."
Bill Gates had to say this from his Island Compound of Australia, "Gooday Mate, Yes Microsoft is very concerned about security but if we had plugged the hole the Chinese used then they would have had to develop all this crap themselves. Who knows maybe there stuff would have worked better." Now back to our regularly scheduled news show on CNN with Britney Spears She's Sexy, she's cute, and, oh yeah, she's got a little bit of a brain.
For anybody with half a brain the philosophy of "if you build it, they will come." Which was the mantra of many many dot com companies, was a recipe for disaster. The authors of the book merely had to wait around for enough failures to accumulate before writing there book.
Experimenting with stupid people's (venture capatalists) money may be a great way to blow through a million or fifty, but its a dumb way to build a business.
But when looking for an example, look know further than Nortel who recently lost something like 17 Billion in a single quarter. The only way to do that is to buy a whole bunch of companies that don't actually have a product and then run them out of business.
Did you read the article or are you just posting inflamatory material for kicks. First, the Government never said Council was being denied. Second, they put up huge road blocks to insure that Government lawyers don't have access to privledged information. Third, they tell the prisoners that this particular action is being taken. All of this is safeguarded by a requirement that they have to show to a judge that there is a good chance the prisoner knows something about future terrorist attacks.
Not to mention that if a future terrorist attack did happen and they could have prevented it by listening in on the interviews, loss to life could be catastrophic.
I read the Katz article and I am at a loss as to what the actual point was. Is he for/against multinationals? What does this have to do with our current war, recession, or the troubles in Caladonia?
I don't know about digital culling of pictures at news events but I'm pretty sure that five thousand years from now they are going to look back at our digital archive and decide that Burt really is Evil.
Slavery has been around since well before Budha was born. Racism is built into the species. Nagasaki-Hiroshima were the exclamation points to the end of a terrible time that we didn't start and would have been nothing compared to the Japanese lives lost had we invaded.
Mutual respect is a value which can only exist if both sides have it. So far Arabs have no respect for us. Cultural diversity is slang for "I want to live in a tent and sleep with sheep." Organic Decentralized global village is a code word phrase for I'm so full of shit I got it comming out of my eyes.
I've read a goodly number of the responses to Katz's article today. The only thing I can really say is that most people responding to this thread probably need to brush up on the recent middle east history. I would start at about 1900 and work my way forward. Take a look at it with an uncritical eye and see what you come up with.
The number of factual errors propogated by people who are absolutely convinced that they are right is astounding.
Two things need to be said though, and they need to be said at as a global point of discussion.
The first is that while the US has, in a lot of cases, really botched things in certain areas in the Middle East. They are not now, nor have they ever been at the root of all that is evil in these countries. A Good number of these countries have governments more closely resembling the Catholic Church during the Spanish Inquisition and it is unfair and incorrect to assume that this has anything to do with US policy in the Middle East.
Second, the US supplies a good majority of all relief to all disastors that occur anywhere in the world. In most cases, civilized countries will welcome that aid and that relief, even if they don't like us very much. In the middle east and in France they will take that relief and then spit at us as we leave.
So, before you all resume your American Policy bashing please do two things. Brush up on your history and please remember who is paying for the food supplies being dropped in Afghanistan even as we bomb military targets.
Keep in mind two questions as well. First, if Bin Laden had decided to bomb the Kremlin would Afghanistan even exist now? Two, if Bin Laden had decided to bomb the Forbidden City would Afghanistan even exist now?
I've been on a lot of projects and there are two types of 'Quirky' developers that I've come across. The first is the long haired hippy type. They may have short hair, but the have the sole of someone from Oakland. These are the guys that no every odd little thing about their operating system of choice. They play D&D. They code like demons. Sometimes a project can't live without them. Usually nobody even notices they are gone. The second 'quirky' type is much more sublte. He's the one with the wierd laugh. He's probably annoying. He may smell but probably doesn't. Management usually hates him but every once in a while he become management. These are the guys who don't get the girl. They don't get the program. They couldn't tell you what the scores to the game were last weekend and they definetly don't even know what games were played last weekend. Their attention is on their code. They are the people who everybody else goes to for help. These are the people that other programmer's look up to. They are 'quirky' true. But they are programmers and developers and without fail if a company chases one of these guys away the company won't produce anything good after that. If you're Microsoft you may have a dozen or two dozen of these guys and may two or three hundred of the other type.
Fancy tricks like XP and Scrum are nice buzz words from people who don't code in the trenches anymore, but, if you scare away the chief guru then you might as well shut the door to the business. I've seen that happen at least three times.
There is a difference between 'Guru' and 'Wierdo' and the author should have known better.
The reason why the record industry is doing poorly is because they sued Napster and shut them down. I used Napster to listen to music I liked but couldn't find on the radio. If I liked a song enough I went out and actually bought the CD that the song existed on. It isn't enough for me to download the song onto the one machine I have dedicated for that task, I wanted to be able to listen to the whole CD and that meant that I bought it.
The music industry shuts down Napster, which automatically makes me angry at the music industry. So I stop buying CD's from the music industry. Not only that, but I also stop buying things I can copy music onto. Like blank CDs and disk drives and such. Those companies loose sales because not only do I stop buying CDs, but also so did two million other people. This means that probably a dozen, maybe two dozen companies suddenly can't pay their bills. They start laying off people and maybe they go out of business and maybe they just scale back but the fact is, they are in a recession. So those dozen or two dozen companies employ something like a quarter of a million people and of those maybe something like fifty thousand are now out of work. Those people now half to scale back on everything if they don't want to loose what they still have. No to mention the 200,000 people that are still working but are now terrified that they are next. But these people aren't the only ones who are scared. People read about it in the newspapers and they begin to think: "I don't think I'm going to buy that new cell phone today. I can afford it, but God, look at the economy." Before you know it we are in a full scale recession. This is because some record executive was afraid he might loose sales on CDs for Twisted Sister or Metallica.
They have their cause and effect really screwed up. They say, "It's all those people out there copying this stuff that's hurting us." It isn't that. Most people I know are fairly honest and if they make copies its almost always for themselves to use on some medium the record company didn't think of. Most people aren't buying music from these companies because they see how much the artists and the companies themselves hate their customers. It is this contempt for their customers that has put them in this pickle. Now they grind salt into their own self inflicted wounds and make it so that you can only copy onto a blank CD. This ought to make there customers happy.
Mr. Stallman's plea for the protection is a nobel, yet misguided effort. The truth is, in times of war the United States has every right to declare martial law and suspend all civil liberties until the action is complete. They have acted on this right in almost every major engagement for the last two hundred years.
I submit that it is not possible to talk about civil liberties and safety while we scrutinize and search every car going on a military installation and every bag going on an airplane. I believe that at this point in time it would be irresponsible to criticize a lot of the knee jerk reactions of the FBI and congress simply because there goal is the protection of America and the safety of Americans.
Mr. Stallman noted the back door into encryption is a scary development. I feel that it is merely moronic. It's not as if terrorists are going to buy the U.S. products. I can see the sales add now, "Buy U.S. Encryption, good enough to keep out everybody but the FBI."
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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· Score: 2
Nuking them back into the stone-age is a satisfying thought if you don't mind the fact that the rest of the world would villify us for it. I have a different approach.
Find the countries that host these people. Give them time to get their people out of their cities and out of their country. Carpet bomb the cities until nothing but sand remains. March into the country and herd every living thing out and then poison the land and the water supply. Make the hosting country disappear as a nation. Make their land uninhabitable. Let the world know that an attack on the United States is an invitation for national suicide. I'm not for mass murder. I'm for retribution so vast and so terrible that ten thousand years from now they remember our response as if it were yesterday.
As for the actual terrorists. There comes a point when punishment isn't enough. You kill the terrorists. You kill their family and their friends. You kill there neighbors. You let people know that if they are willing to commit acts of terror not only you will die but all of your friends and family will die as well.
Would suicide bombers be so casual with there lives if they new that everything they know and everything they believe would cease to be because of their actions?
Twenty-five years ago a guy I went to school with called one HP computer on the local school modem, had it call another computer and then had them both take each other down. He did it with Basic and he did it in such a way as to cause HP to send a maintenance rep out to figure out what happened to their machines.
When you got a machine twenty-five years ago you had to put it together chip by chip. There weren't any Apples. If you were a kid and you were playing around with this stuff, and I was, you learned to program in machine code because that was the only thing available (I sucked at it but my Dad was a genious).
Ever since the dawn of the computer age intelligent children have been using machines to do things that older people never invisioned. I've seen stories every year for the past twenty years about how this kid or that kid has just done something truly astounding with his computer. The thing is, its rare. I don't mean rare like a quarter landing on its edge during a flip. I mean really, really rare that you get a kid, or even an adult for that matter, that does something so totally astounding that everybody else around him looks and says "Gee, look how much smarter kids are these days."
What isn't reported is that now there is so much drivel, so much crap on the web, that you have to be a genious just to wade through it all. It doesn't take a genious to visit slashdot and talk tough about hacking some web site. Anybody and his brother can do that.
From my perspective the difference between nerd kids today and nerd kids twenty years ago is that today's generation has never thought about what it would take to actually build a computer from scratch. It would never cross their mind. This isn't good or bad. It's just different.
On the other hand, it is my belief that kids today have much less of a real clue about how the world works than they did twenty years ago. Twenty years ago if you wanted to really get involved in the process you had to get your butt out the door and put it to some use. Now you can convince yourself that you are involved just by writing about the injustice of it all on a Slashdot web site.
All those airplanes and not one collision. And this is with people involved. And you want to try to hit two missles together at three or four times their speed.
Outside of being flame bait and off topic this does deserve an answer.
The missle defense system won't work for the same reason the Denver International Baggage handling system doesn't work. Coordination between two moving object is extremely difficult when the objects are moving slowly and you have control of them. Coordination between two moving objects that are moving at a couple of thousand miles and hour at each other and where you only have control of one of them is a whole different issue.
Plus, it's also a matter of scale. We can probably shoot down one incomming missle. Maybe ten also. Is anybody really ready to suggest that a full scale nuclear attack would include ten enemy missles for every one we are capable of shooting down. Build some self defense into those incoming enemy missles and we won't be able to shoot any of them down.
In any case, a 90% success rate against a full scale nuclear attack will only mean that the crater that used to be my home town is a thousand feet deep, as oppossed to ten-thousand. Big victory there.
Back around 1991-1992 a Company I worked for was making a Warehouse Database Management Control System for a very large cigarette company. They spent something like seven maybe eight months working on it and they had a pretty nice demo for the customer to show them how on-track they were for installation a mere month or three away.
There was only one problem. The design team hadn't actually coded in the database portion of the DBMS. They just used flat files and convinced both their own employer as well the customer that everything was working just fine.
I don't know how anybody found them out but by the time they were done they fired the whole development team and started over again. The second time they actually instituted oversite into the project. What a novel concept.
This response makes me think that the author is a Timothy McVey in training. Heck what's a few children if they rest of you get my point. Heck what's a few billion if the rest of you get my point.
What the author has forgotten is that most americans have zero tolerance for civil disobedience. They have even less tolerance for acts of vandalism and terrorism. And fundimentally, if the author isn't willing to shoot someone to make a point then he's just ranting anyway.
The Patriots who threw tea overboard in Boston Harbor were willing to risk everything they had to make a point about taxation from the crown. Are Slashdotees willing to make the same commitment? I think not.
It wouldn't matter anyway because in truth unless you have the makings of a committed and well funded five or seven million man army you couldn't force change on the U.S. even if you want to.
If you really want to change DCMA then you need to be involved politically and you need to take a page from activists belonging to breast cancer research, AIDS research, and homosexuals. Fundimentally this is the way to affect change in the United States. Anything else can be viewed as acts of sedition and would be dispised by the rest of your countrymen.
I think Assembly is the learning tool of choice. Nothing teaches appreciation for C better than Assembly. Wait, though, if you want appreciation for Assembly you need to learn machine code.
It's actually very simple. Don't worry about it. Kids only search on things that they care about after a bit. This doesn't mean they might not experiment, but the truth is at that age moral ambiguity is pretty darn boring. If you are concerned about nudity and such then just make the rules clear and tell her without a doubt that you can look at what she has looked at. Embarassment is a wonderful deterent.
Typically eleven year olds look up what eleven year olds are interested in. If you're concerned about Nazi's, bigotry, homosexuality, nudity, democracy, liberalism, conservatism, and all other sorts of wrongs reaching out and grabbing your daughter, then don't worry about it. They don't reach out and grab and kids find that kind of stuff, stupid, boring, insipid, noxcious, insulting, dumb, and gross.
The test for Carpal Tunnel is very simple and one that anybody with the syndrome should have done. Take a needle, stick it in your hand, wiggle it and measure how long it takes the pain to get to your arm pit. Run a current through one nerve and measure how long it takes the signal to travel to another part of your body. If it falls within the parameters you have CTS, if it doesn't, you don't.
I don't know what this doctor is talking about in the article but CTS is a proven measurable syndrome. There are at least three known possible cures for it, the first is wrist protection, the second is anti-inflamatory, and the third is surgery.
When they say "Ergonomics" will help, they are lying, most damage is done at night, which is why that is when you are supposed to where the braces.
The surgery is pretty much painless, except of course the three or so months of recovery your hand goes through.
As I tell my friends, I traded numbness for pain. All in all it was a fair trade.
Could it have gone away on its own? Probably. Would it have gotten worse? Probably.
This whole discussion should be invalidated by a new first corollary to Godwin's Law. Such a Corollary should read:
The moment someone mentions "Culture", and "Lawsuit" in the same sentence they should be taken out and whipped with a wet noodle. If a noodle isn't available then a plastic spork from Taco Bell will do the trick.
Why? Because there is no way to win, no point to make, and no facts to prove. In this case the Maori are stupid, Lego is stupid, the whole article is stupid.
More to the point though is that it is odd anybody should have found that the Maori suing Lego for Culteral Copyright Infringement should ever have made it into Slashdot in the first place. If the Maori had decided to sue John Deere would Slashdot have cared?
Linux shifts the economy from product-based to service based (since the product is free + your time). IBM sells services, and they like Linux. Microsoft sells products, and feels their bottom line is being threatened. They have a right to make a product, and people have a right to buy, or not to buy, their product
You're partly right. IBM sells hardware, they don't care what software it runs so long as it sells hardware. Microsoft sells software, Linux competes directly with their bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, RMS has turned something mundaine, such as reading your email, into a political statement. For 99.9999% of all people who use the computer the whole point of using the computer is so that they can do their job better. They don't make the decision about which software packages to buy. They don't make the decision about what format to use to save file. They don't know the difference between RTF and DOC formats. They couldn't read HTML if it reached out and bit them in the butt.
.DOC documents and, believe it or not, I'm not concerned about my older documents becoming unreadable. What Stallman forgets is that the format is as much a straight jacket for Microsoft as for anybody else. Sure you may or may not be able to read a ten year old document but I would bet that twenty years from now I will still be able to read documents I write this year. It's entirely possible that this will be true a hundred or even a thousand years from now.
.NET adds a whole bunch of new key words to C++. You could also refuse to use a compiler built and sold by Microsoft. Write code that only works on Linux. Work on things that make computing better, not just more difficult.
All they want to do is read their email and use their documents. If they have to forward it on to someone else then they just want to take the document and drop it in a letter and send it on. They don't want to have to deal with the complete and total hassle of opening the document and saving it off as some sort of Stallman approved attachment and then dropping that into an email attachment.
The whole point behind the computer age is that these machines are supposed to make our lives easier. I for one could care less who owns the format for Microsoft
The other possibility is that Microsoft obsoletes documents written more than seven or some years ago. This is, of course, nutty because Microsoft's customers would sue them into the poor house, or worse, just stop buying upgrades.
Think I'm wrong, take a look at how long it took for them to get ride of the 8086 stuff, and that was an idea everybody agreed on.
I understand Stallman's political point but what he is doing is guaranteeing that he never sees another email from someone who uses Word. His proposed solution is little more than taking a tiny sharp stick and digging it around in an open wound. Or worse, its just another rock in the shoe of life.
Want to make a political statement? Then ask why
News Bulletin: Rome, Italy .NET website. It's a good thing they were so complete because the enemy hit the same software opportunity as us. They couldn't stop it though and they lost all but one of their drones.
Allied forces suffered a serious setback today as an unexpected software opportunity caused the Fifth Armored Drone Division to target each other as opposed to the enemy. By the time he could stop the effort Colonel Alex "DarthMaulGuy" Smith, a sixteen year old Miami resident, was only able to save thirty drones.
"I would have saved more but my Mom kept calling me for dinner."
The President, Ronald Reagan (son of the late President of the same name), said "It would have been a disaster except the Chinese-India-Somalia coalition downloaded the plans for the drones from Microsoft's
General Smith, Promoted, said of this, "The Somalians asked me to fix it but Mom made Strawberry Shortcake."
Bill Gates had to say this from his Island Compound of Australia, "Gooday Mate, Yes Microsoft is very concerned about security but if we had plugged the hole the Chinese used then they would have had to develop all this crap themselves. Who knows maybe there stuff would have worked better."
Now back to our regularly scheduled news show on CNN with Britney Spears
She's Sexy, she's cute, and, oh yeah, she's got a little bit of a brain.
There is no greater tragedy in life than getting a degree in a field you don't like and then doing that job for the next twenty years.
You may be flipping burgers with a degree in linguistics or philosophy, but you'll probably be a lot happier than you would as a programmer.
Do what you are good at...
For anybody with half a brain the philosophy of "if you build it, they will come." Which was the mantra of many many dot com companies, was a recipe for disaster. The authors of the book merely had to wait around for enough failures to accumulate before writing there book.
Experimenting with stupid people's (venture capatalists) money may be a great way to blow through a million or fifty, but its a dumb way to build a business.
But when looking for an example, look know further than Nortel who recently lost something like 17 Billion in a single quarter. The only way to do that is to buy a whole bunch of companies that don't actually have a product and then run them out of business.
Did you read the article or are you just posting inflamatory material for kicks. First, the Government never said Council was being denied. Second, they put up huge road blocks to insure that Government lawyers don't have access to privledged information. Third, they tell the prisoners that this particular action is being taken. All of this is safeguarded by a requirement that they have to show to a judge that there is a good chance the prisoner knows something about future terrorist attacks.
Not to mention that if a future terrorist attack did happen and they could have prevented it by listening in on the interviews, loss to life could be catastrophic.
Remember the life you save, could be your own.
I read the Katz article and I am at a loss as to what the actual point was. Is he for/against multinationals? What does this have to do with our current war, recession, or the troubles in Caladonia?
I don't know about digital culling of pictures at news events but I'm pretty sure that five thousand years from now they are going to look back at our digital archive and decide that Burt really is Evil.
I'm not your brother.
Slavery has been around since well before Budha was born. Racism is built into the species. Nagasaki-Hiroshima were the exclamation points to the end of a terrible time that we didn't start and would have been nothing compared to the Japanese lives lost had we invaded.
Mutual respect is a value which can only exist if both sides have it. So far Arabs have no respect for us. Cultural diversity is slang for "I want to live in a tent and sleep with sheep." Organic Decentralized global village is a code word phrase for I'm so full of shit I got it comming out of my eyes.
Your post is the post of a Moron.
I've read a goodly number of the responses to Katz's article today. The only thing I can really say is that most people responding to this thread probably need to brush up on the recent middle east history. I would start at about 1900 and work my way forward. Take a look at it with an uncritical eye and see what you come up with.
The number of factual errors propogated by people who are absolutely convinced that they are right is astounding.
Two things need to be said though, and they need to be said at as a global point of discussion.
The first is that while the US has, in a lot of cases, really botched things in certain areas in the Middle East. They are not now, nor have they ever been at the root of all that is evil in these countries. A Good number of these countries have governments more closely resembling the Catholic Church during the Spanish Inquisition and it is unfair and incorrect to assume that this has anything to do with US policy in the Middle East.
Second, the US supplies a good majority of all relief to all disastors that occur anywhere in the world. In most cases, civilized countries will welcome that aid and that relief, even if they don't like us very much. In the middle east and in France they will take that relief and then spit at us as we leave.
So, before you all resume your American Policy bashing please do two things. Brush up on your history and please remember who is paying for the food supplies being dropped in Afghanistan even as we bomb military targets.
Keep in mind two questions as well. First, if Bin Laden had decided to bomb the Kremlin would Afghanistan even exist now? Two, if Bin Laden had decided to bomb the Forbidden City would Afghanistan even exist now?
I've been on a lot of projects and there are two types of 'Quirky' developers that I've come across. The first is the long haired hippy type. They may have short hair, but the have the sole of someone from Oakland. These are the guys that no every odd little thing about their operating system of choice. They play D&D. They code like demons. Sometimes a project can't live without them. Usually nobody even notices they are gone. The second 'quirky' type is much more sublte. He's the one with the wierd laugh. He's probably annoying. He may smell but probably doesn't. Management usually hates him but every once in a while he become management. These are the guys who don't get the girl. They don't get the program. They couldn't tell you what the scores to the game were last weekend and they definetly don't even know what games were played last weekend. Their attention is on their code. They are the people who everybody else goes to for help. These are the people that other programmer's look up to. They are 'quirky' true. But they are programmers and developers and without fail if a company chases one of these guys away the company won't produce anything good after that. If you're Microsoft you may have a dozen or two dozen of these guys and may two or three hundred of the other type.
Fancy tricks like XP and Scrum are nice buzz words from people who don't code in the trenches anymore, but, if you scare away the chief guru then you might as well shut the door to the business. I've seen that happen at least three times.
There is a difference between 'Guru' and 'Wierdo' and the author should have known better.
The reason why the record industry is doing poorly is because they sued Napster and shut them down. I used Napster to listen to music I liked but couldn't find on the radio. If I liked a song enough I went out and actually bought the CD that the song existed on. It isn't enough for me to download the song onto the one machine I have dedicated for that task, I wanted to be able to listen to the whole CD and that meant that I bought it.
The music industry shuts down Napster, which automatically makes me angry at the music industry. So I stop buying CD's from the music industry. Not only that, but I also stop buying things I can copy music onto. Like blank CDs and disk drives and such. Those companies loose sales because not only do I stop buying CDs, but also so did two million other people. This means that probably a dozen, maybe two dozen companies suddenly can't pay their bills. They start laying off people and maybe they go out of business and maybe they just scale back but the fact is, they are in a recession. So those dozen or two dozen companies employ something like a quarter of a million people and of those maybe something like fifty thousand are now out of work. Those people now half to scale back on everything if they don't want to loose what they still have. No to mention the 200,000 people that are still working but are now terrified that they are next. But these people aren't the only ones who are scared. People read about it in the newspapers and they begin to think: "I don't think I'm going to buy that new cell phone today. I can afford it, but God, look at the economy." Before you know it we are in a full scale recession. This is because some record executive was afraid he might loose sales on CDs for Twisted Sister or Metallica.
They have their cause and effect really screwed up. They say, "It's all those people out there copying this stuff that's hurting us." It isn't that. Most people I know are fairly honest and if they make copies its almost always for themselves to use on some medium the record company didn't think of. Most people aren't buying music from these companies because they see how much the artists and the companies themselves hate their customers. It is this contempt for their customers that has put them in this pickle. Now they grind salt into their own self inflicted wounds and make it so that you can only copy onto a blank CD. This ought to make there customers happy.
Mr. Stallman's plea for the protection is a nobel, yet misguided effort. The truth is, in times of war the United States has every right to declare martial law and suspend all civil liberties until the action is complete. They have acted on this right in almost every major engagement for the last two hundred years.
I submit that it is not possible to talk about civil liberties and safety while we scrutinize and search every car going on a military installation and every bag going on an airplane. I believe that at this point in time it would be irresponsible to criticize a lot of the knee jerk reactions of the FBI and congress simply because there goal is the protection of America and the safety of Americans.
Mr. Stallman noted the back door into encryption is a scary development. I feel that it is merely moronic. It's not as if terrorists are going to buy the U.S. products. I can see the sales add now, "Buy U.S. Encryption, good enough to keep out everybody but the FBI."
Nuking them back into the stone-age is a satisfying thought if you don't mind the fact that the rest of the world would villify us for it. I have a different approach.
Find the countries that host these people. Give them time to get their people out of their cities and out of their country. Carpet bomb the cities until nothing but sand remains. March into the country and herd every living thing out and then poison the land and the water supply. Make the hosting country disappear as a nation. Make their land uninhabitable. Let the world know that an attack on the United States is an invitation for national suicide. I'm not for mass murder. I'm for retribution so vast and so terrible that ten thousand years from now they remember our response as if it were yesterday.
As for the actual terrorists. There comes a point when punishment isn't enough. You kill the terrorists. You kill their family and their friends. You kill there neighbors. You let people know that if they are willing to commit acts of terror not only you will die but all of your friends and family will die as well.
Would suicide bombers be so casual with there lives if they new that everything they know and everything they believe would cease to be because of their actions?
Where's Florda?
Katz you've outdone yourself.
Twenty-five years ago a guy I went to school with called one HP computer on the local school modem, had it call another computer and then had them both take each other down. He did it with Basic and he did it in such a way as to cause HP to send a maintenance rep out to figure out what happened to their machines.
When you got a machine twenty-five years ago you had to put it together chip by chip. There weren't any Apples. If you were a kid and you were playing around with this stuff, and I was, you learned to program in machine code because that was the only thing available (I sucked at it but my Dad was a genious).
Ever since the dawn of the computer age intelligent children have been using machines to do things that older people never invisioned. I've seen stories every year for the past twenty years about how this kid or that kid has just done something truly astounding with his computer. The thing is, its rare. I don't mean rare like a quarter landing on its edge during a flip. I mean really, really rare that you get a kid, or even an adult for that matter, that does something so totally astounding that everybody else around him looks and says "Gee, look how much smarter kids are these days."
What isn't reported is that now there is so much drivel, so much crap on the web, that you have to be a genious just to wade through it all. It doesn't take a genious to visit slashdot and talk tough about hacking some web site. Anybody and his brother can do that.
From my perspective the difference between nerd kids today and nerd kids twenty years ago is that today's generation has never thought about what it would take to actually build a computer from scratch. It would never cross their mind. This isn't good or bad. It's just different.
On the other hand, it is my belief that kids today have much less of a real clue about how the world works than they did twenty years ago. Twenty years ago if you wanted to really get involved in the process you had to get your butt out the door and put it to some use. Now you can convince yourself that you are involved just by writing about the injustice of it all on a Slashdot web site.
All those airplanes and not one collision. And this is with people involved. And you want to try to hit two missles together at three or four times their speed.
Outside of being flame bait and off topic this does deserve an answer.
The missle defense system won't work for the same reason the Denver International Baggage handling system doesn't work. Coordination between two moving object is extremely difficult when the objects are moving slowly and you have control of them. Coordination between two moving objects that are moving at a couple of thousand miles and hour at each other and where you only have control of one of them is a whole different issue.
Plus, it's also a matter of scale. We can probably shoot down one incomming missle. Maybe ten also. Is anybody really ready to suggest that a full scale nuclear attack would include ten enemy missles for every one we are capable of shooting down. Build some self defense into those incoming enemy missles and we won't be able to shoot any of them down.
In any case, a 90% success rate against a full scale nuclear attack will only mean that the crater that used to be my home town is a thousand feet deep, as oppossed to ten-thousand. Big victory there.
Back around 1991-1992 a Company I worked for was making a Warehouse Database Management Control System for a very large cigarette company. They spent something like seven maybe eight months working on it and they had a pretty nice demo for the customer to show them how on-track they were for installation a mere month or three away.
There was only one problem. The design team hadn't actually coded in the database portion of the DBMS. They just used flat files and convinced both their own employer as well the customer that everything was working just fine.
I don't know how anybody found them out but by the time they were done they fired the whole development team and started over again. The second time they actually instituted oversite into the project. What a novel concept.
This response makes me think that the author is a Timothy McVey in training. Heck what's a few children if they rest of you get my point. Heck what's a few billion if the rest of you get my point.
What the author has forgotten is that most americans have zero tolerance for civil disobedience. They have even less tolerance for acts of vandalism and terrorism. And fundimentally, if the author isn't willing to shoot someone to make a point then he's just ranting anyway.
The Patriots who threw tea overboard in Boston Harbor were willing to risk everything they had to make a point about taxation from the crown. Are Slashdotees willing to make the same commitment? I think not.
It wouldn't matter anyway because in truth unless you have the makings of a committed and well funded five or seven million man army you couldn't force change on the U.S. even if you want to.
If you really want to change DCMA then you need to be involved politically and you need to take a page from activists belonging to breast cancer research, AIDS research, and homosexuals. Fundimentally this is the way to affect change in the United States. Anything else can be viewed as acts of sedition and would be dispised by the rest of your countrymen.
I think Assembly is the learning tool of choice. Nothing teaches appreciation for C better than Assembly. Wait, though, if you want appreciation for Assembly you need to learn machine code.
Outside of being off-topic. I find your arguement moronic. If you truly believed this you wouldn't be here posting now would you.
It's actually very simple. Don't worry about it. Kids only search on things that they care about after a bit. This doesn't mean they might not experiment, but the truth is at that age moral ambiguity is pretty darn boring. If you are concerned about nudity and such then just make the rules clear and tell her without a doubt that you can look at what she has looked at. Embarassment is a wonderful deterent.
Typically eleven year olds look up what eleven year olds are interested in. If you're concerned about Nazi's, bigotry, homosexuality, nudity, democracy, liberalism, conservatism, and all other sorts of wrongs reaching out and grabbing your daughter, then don't worry about it. They don't reach out and grab and kids find that kind of stuff, stupid, boring, insipid, noxcious, insulting, dumb, and gross.
The test for Carpal Tunnel is very simple and one that anybody with the syndrome should have done. Take a needle, stick it in your hand, wiggle it and measure how long it takes the pain to get to your arm pit. Run a current through one nerve and measure how long it takes the signal to travel to another part of your body. If it falls within the parameters you have CTS, if it doesn't, you don't.
I don't know what this doctor is talking about in the article but CTS is a proven measurable syndrome. There are at least three known possible cures for it, the first is wrist protection, the second is anti-inflamatory, and the third is surgery.
When they say "Ergonomics" will help, they are lying, most damage is done at night, which is why that is when you are supposed to where the braces.
The surgery is pretty much painless, except of course the three or so months of recovery your hand goes through.
As I tell my friends, I traded numbness for pain. All in all it was a fair trade.
Could it have gone away on its own? Probably. Would it have gotten worse? Probably.
This whole discussion should be invalidated by a new first corollary to Godwin's Law. Such a Corollary should read:
The moment someone mentions "Culture", and "Lawsuit" in the same sentence they should be taken out and whipped with a wet noodle. If a noodle isn't available then a plastic spork from Taco Bell will do the trick.
Why? Because there is no way to win, no point to make, and no facts to prove. In this case the Maori are stupid, Lego is stupid, the whole article is stupid.
More to the point though is that it is odd anybody should have found that the Maori suing Lego for Culteral Copyright Infringement should ever have made it into Slashdot in the first place. If the Maori had decided to sue John Deere would Slashdot have cared?
Linux shifts the economy from product-based to service based (since the product is free + your time). IBM sells services, and they like Linux. Microsoft sells products, and feels their bottom line is being threatened. They have a right to make a product, and people have a right to buy, or not to buy, their product
You're partly right. IBM sells hardware, they don't care what software it runs so long as it sells hardware. Microsoft sells software, Linux competes directly with their bottom line.