You stupid bonehead. The Win95 installer boot disk is just a system disk (io.sys,msdos.sys,command.com) with enough support to barely recognize a cd-rom drive (made much easier when most cd drives went atapi) It then calls setup.exe on the cd drive. You pull this one out of your ass or something?
A few years back, I made a disk that did the following things.
It booted a dos 6.22 environment with ramdisk support (4MB ramdisk. Memory was a lot more expensive back then) It then ran PKunzip on my custom zipfile which dumped just enough win3.1 files in the ramdisk (things like WIN.COM, a few DLLs, SYSTEM.DAT, ARIAL.TTF, FILEMAN.EXE, and NOTEPAD.EXE). I could've spanned the zipfile to another floppy and had more, but it was enough to have a single disk that gave me a GUI, a filemanager, and a text editor. (I've got an early version of this still around somewhere. Enough to squeeze a standard-mode win3.1 environment on a 1.44 floppy uncompressed, if anyone's interested, maybe I'll dig it up and do a filelisting or something so you can go off and recreate it yourself)
So could I redo this in a linux environment? Yes. I would have to write my own custom GUI and browser to do it, but I'm confident with enough effort, it could be done. Maybe the answer is even easier and it would just be "Hey, port photon to linux along with its browser and we've got the same thing"
You've gone off and made the mistake of assuming either that the linux kernel is always going to be way too big or that they put the whole QNX OS on that floppy or that the gui and browser are part of the qnx kernel. I'd be very worried if someone tried to squeeze an unmodified version of Xfree86 into an embedded device -- you think that's what TiVo's using? The jailbait image that I referred to above manages to squeeze a copy of Xfree, Netscape Navigator, Blackbox, and a bunch of other stuff within the 16MB limit. Sure, they were doing stuff like what I did with packing things into compressed archives and loading them into a ramdisk, but I'm confident that with some custom coding, you could do a lot better. (if they didn't build XF86_SVGA without support for anything but the chipset in the i-opener, they probably could've saved some space right there.)
So the better question is can you make a linux kernel that fits in 1.44MB - ((diskspace for gui) + (diskspace for browser) + (diskspace for any necessary commands)). I think you can.
If Linux isn't suitable for embedded applications, several groups out there have already proven that it in fact can be made to fit in a nice small space right nicely. IBM's proof of concept linux-on-a-watch is a good example, or the promised linux PDA, Yopy...heck, look at all the people who spent their summer taking the netpliance i-opener, or the websurfer pro and putting linux on them. Sure, plenty of people installed hard drives in those beasts, but there was more than a handful that didn't go that route and just dumped a linux partition image onto the Sandisk disk-on-chip device. Enough people so as to make it practical for a group to make a prefab image known as Jailbait to stick in there under the 16MB limit....with more programs/functionality than netpliance's gimpy little QNX image (btw, for anyone who's itching for another pronunciation war, I pronounce it Kyoo-Enn-Ecks) So secondary storage isn't a problem...perhaps you're talking about primary storage and the wonderful universe of volatile memory? The i-opener has 32MB. My laptop has less than that, and I've never seen a problem with it. Perhaps you were talking about something like those Xerox copiers that use an embedded linux kernel buried deep inside that I read about a few years ago.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that the behavior of linux on your desktop is going to be the same as linux aimed for a cramped enviroment. Ever tried to see how small you can make a kernel? Try taking out all filesystem support. Or PCI support. Make sure you aren't supporting the old a.out binaries. Or plug and play devices. Or floppy disk drives. Or any IP-related stuff that isn't necessary for a non-server. Most of these devices thus far have excluded ethernet cards, so unless your device is among the first to do so, you won't need it here. How bad do you need the console support on a machine that won't have people ever seeing the console?
So now that you've got your stripped kernel, what if it's too big? Why not go through the source and trim it even more? Who needs a source license and NDA's up the wazoo just to make it work on a prototype platform?
ok, so maybe Linux isn't the answer for everything and everybody...but to make a general statement like "Linux is not really suitable for small embedded applications, since it has a large" (you never actually finished this sentence, it's that vague...) says exactly nothing. Add to that your assumption that these devices have less memory than a fair amount of them do...and we have BLATANT UNPROVED ASSERTIONS! Whee!
Come back when you have some facts to back these up.
Add something else to this line of thought: it is legal to disassemble software. After the initial round of legal nastygrams went out, I asked a number of people in the know about the legality of this whole mess, and the common answer was: It is legal to disassemble software. If you use those instructions line for line in another product, that is not protected, but you can dig up the algorithm, reimplement it yourself, and all is fine. The DMCA (DCMA? I don't remember. It's morning) has made some weird restrictions on reverse engineering, but there's no copyrighted information we are accessing, they can't even wave that one around.
So, this lands under contract law -- the sort of thing where they start saying "If you do not agree to these terms, we do not acknowledge your existence and therefore you must vaporize immediately or stop using our product", but even with that in mind, there's still some problems. They've just made changes to a contract nobody agreed to in the first place, which is not available with the product, neither through radio shack or the magazines that sent them to their subscribers.
ZDNet's got a Kevin Poulsen-written article on the Mitnick release here.
(Most of what I know of the Mitnick story comes from Jonathan Littman's book "The Fugitive Game" (which is about as Kevin sympathetic as "Takedown" is self-congradulatory), and the article sounds like Lewis DePayne's pretty Anti-Kevin now -- of course, he's got his own legal problems and probably wants to avoid some of the attention that a former accomplice might bring)
ABC News has (at least as of midnight thursday) a poll on whether hackers should go to jail on their front page. (Not many options though.) They've got the Associated Press story on it here. Salon's got the same AP story here. (in case you want to look at different banner ads, I guess)
A decent summary of the Miramax flick is here. (interestingly, it lists the Project phase as "In the can" which sounds worse than "On the shelf" as the other articles mention-- which is too bad. I kinda wanted to see the story with a fistfight between Mitnick and Shimomura and everyone on rollerblades and constantly saying "What is the Matrix?")
if you replace the linux kernel with a different version (i.e., 2.0.x to 2.2.x), it's still linux.
if you replace the linux kernel with a third-party alternative, perhaps a bsd kernel, it really isn't linux anymore, is it?
I was trying to think up a good way of saying "if you can replace a component of the operating system, and it's still the same operating system, said component probably isn't part of the operating system.", while avoiding the jeers of "yeah, well, if you replace ie in win98, it isn't really win98 anymore!".
My definition is that an operating system is the piece of software which 1) interacts and controls the hardware and 2) provides the ability for other software to be run without needing to directly control the hardware.
GUI's are thus not part of the operating system. Now would be a good time to dig up the label of "operating enviroment" (I've only heard it attributed to windows 3.x, but the concept is pretty much the same whether you're referring to X, the Presentation Manger/Workplace Shell, etc. The system running underneath is still capable of controlling/interacting with the hardware).
The web browser is an application. Just because they're moving towards becoming the catch-all text presentation system (html/xml, online help, command references, etc. ) does not change the fact that other pieces of independent software are still capable of running without their presence.
My basic rule for determining what is part of the operating system: if you can replace a component with a third-party alternative, with the operating system as a whole still being able to fit the previous definition, it is not part of the OS. Thus, internet explorer is not part of the windows operating system, as you could replace it's html viewing abilities with mozilla, netscape, opera, etc., you could replace it's ability to run java applications with another java-capable browser, or a standalone jvm. There are a wealth of applications that won't care whether or not you have any sort of browser installed. X is not a part of *nix as an operating system, as you could replace it with berlin (or you will have the opportunity as the berlin project makes more progress). Of course, not every alternative has the same feature set as the original, but you are not compromising the abilities of the operating system itself.
csh - see shell tcsh - tee see shell (these don't explain why I pronounce sh as ess-aich, or bash as bash (the same as bash, the verb to beat upon something.) lilo - lie low (and how come so many people I meet pronounce it the same, but would refer to it as the lynn-ucks loader?) ~ - til-dah # - pound ! - exclamation point. . - period (except in url's (which I pronounce you-are-ell, not earl))
As for others, I've noticed people at the local lug pronounce SuSE as "Susie" (or Siouxsie, if you prefer), but I've always tried to stick with what I've believed the german pronunciation: soo-sah. My brother has been trying to convince me that gnome is pronounced guh-nome, not nome. He also thinks I'm odd for pronouncing GNU as gee-enn-you (it's an acronym), not guh-nu. My argument on this one has always been that I don't pronounce IBM as ibb'm either. Debian? (I've head both Debb-ee-enn and Dayb-ee-enn) I pronounce linux and minix the same way. (lye-nicks, my-nicks). I've also heard people say lib (as in/usr/lib) like library, without the last two syllables. The same people pronounce bin as if it were a trashbin, though I've never heard anyone pronounce binary as binnery. I pronounce gif like gift, and although I've never seen them in the wild myself, there is the graphics file known as JIF, so who cares what's written in the spec. An ambiguity rendered it possibly outdated. Data -- day-tah, dah-ta? The assumption that you can come up with an official pronunciation if you go for root words doesn't work either. Pine is no-longer elm, but who pronounces it "pinn-ee"? I think it's safe to assume that as long as you can come up with a pronunciation that is somewhat close to the original, you can still get your point across.
Thanks to the internet, illiteracy is no longer a problem. Of course, now we don't know how to talk.
-transiit
perhaps I'll start pronouncing grep greep from now on. either that, or it won't be pearl, it will be peril. =)
This makes me glad. My experience with Hercules doesn't go as far back as to have personally known the monochrome cards, (I didn't venture into the realm of the IBM compatibles until 93), but I've been proud of the Herc. Stingray that I got in 95 (not only one of the finer VLB graphics cards, but the avance logic chipset was supported by X, which meant a relatively painless attempt with a copy of slackware from the back of a book cover) My current box has one of the Herc. Dynamite/128's (with the also well-supported ET6000) and I've had no problems with it, either. The "also-ran" crap that's been floating around in here isn't true: Hercules just wasn't of the general consumer market (even though perhaps they should have been focusing there) , and if I remember correctly, they were doing stuff in the high-end design workstation area.
Anyway, I was worrying that with S3's acquisition of Diamond, and Hercules going under (of course, a search on here returns that Hercules was acquired by Elsa on 8-26-98, and then that Hercules went under a year later, I wasn't sure what the hell was going on), my choices for the next video card would be rather lousy. At least nobody's come up with the bright idea that "Hey, we can churn out winmodems for dirt cheap, why not try the same thing with graphics cards? So what's a few hundred lost cycles anyway?"
The only things I found dismaying was the number of sites that use an algorithm for creation of a user id based on your ip address. The other one was x10.com having my name in there (presumably from that firecracker deal they had a while back)
Not a huge deal, just time to update my sblock.conf
-transiit
Re:Everything is Censorship! The sky is falling!
on
Dirty Domains
·
· Score: 1
international standards? oh, yeah, I can see that one:
"'Fuck'? Was ist 'fuck'?"
international standards, my butt. There is no universal code of being offensive. Try pointing with one finger in some cultures.
fwiw, I wasn't disagreeing with the guy because I really, really wanted to go register something like ifuckgoats.org, I just don't believe that the answer is burying our heads in the sand.
euphemisms or complete misinformation aren't the answer either...there's more to it than just trying to defend the offensive names.
-transiit
(and yes, I plan on jumping out in front of your car while you're on your way to work and have to see me and my lame-ass cause.)
Re:Everything is Censorship! The sky is falling!
on
Dirty Domains
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps another oft quoted line "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." is more appropriate. The problem here is that the american judicial system is heavily based on legal precedent, and avoiding that slippery slope fallacy as best I can, each freedom we lose makes it harder to defend our rights. Sure, we've got the ACLU and the EFF, but their resources only last so far, they can't handle every case in every jurisdiction. Our rights are our responsibility. Hoping somebody else will fight for them is not the answer. As for ratings, many movie theatres in this country have agreements with the cities they are in stating that they will not show NC-17 rated movies. I'm not sure whether these involve tax breaks or bending the zoning ordinances, but in the name of community standards, these things do happen. When you factor in the faceless and unaccountable MPAA, we see ourselves ending up with a mess...The first few submissions of Clerks, NC-17 due to language, the first few submissions of South Park, NC-17 for just about every reason under the sun. Are you advocating a similar system for websites? Will you be upset when server-based filtering software becomes the norm with ISPs instead of the exception?
You want to know what the Nazi's have to do with domain names? Let me give you another quote "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
"Oh, so I can try out linux without full committment."...
..."Alright, I downloaded it, ran the installer, clicked the icon and now I'm trying out linux."...
..."Hey, this linux stuff is swell, I'm really enjoying it and I read about how it's actually running slower because it's using UMSDOS...I'll just wipe my drive and start from scratch!"...
..."um, where'd that installer icon go?"...
...thud.
Perhaps more effort should be spent on making feature-complete distributions that exist on a cd for demos and evaluation, and just all around more robust and intuitive (or at least informative*) linux-native installers. The idea is interesting, but if the FUD-wranglers are right about linux support being sparse, psychotic hybrid win95/linux installations aren't going to make things any easier. I'm not as concerned about linux doing weird things to windows, I'd just hate to see things like "Ever since I installed IE5.1, my 'Reboot to Linux' icon just spawns a window with the microsoft website..."
-transiit
* informative - without giving a full lecture at each step of an installation, how will a new user decide if they want package foo? (or for that matter, foo-development)
I think I dislike the idea of how people use all this information they've been busy tracking. I can imagine people yelling at their pizza delivery guy because they saw their call was #3 in the queue, but after tracking the guy's route, they found he delivered the food out of order. Anyone who has worked any sort of customer service will likely recognize the behavior. The concept is a fun idea, but there comes a point in which too much information becomes too much. Time to fire up gnuplot...I've been keeping track of how often I've been checking slashdot daily. In the meantime, check out the California Highway Patrol dispatch page.
Slashdot Mirror
You stupid bonehead. The Win95 installer boot disk is just a system disk (io.sys,msdos.sys,command.com) with enough support to barely recognize a cd-rom drive (made much easier when most cd drives went atapi) It then calls setup.exe on the cd drive. You pull this one out of your ass or something?
-transiit
A few years back, I made a disk that did the following things.
It booted a dos 6.22 environment with ramdisk support (4MB ramdisk. Memory was a lot more expensive back then) It then ran PKunzip on my custom zipfile which dumped just enough win3.1 files in the ramdisk (things like WIN.COM, a few DLLs, SYSTEM.DAT, ARIAL.TTF, FILEMAN.EXE, and NOTEPAD.EXE). I could've spanned the zipfile to another floppy and had more, but it was enough to have a single disk that gave me a GUI, a filemanager, and a text editor.
(I've got an early version of this still around somewhere. Enough to squeeze a standard-mode win3.1 environment on a 1.44 floppy uncompressed, if anyone's interested, maybe I'll dig it up and do a filelisting or something so you can go off and recreate it yourself)
So could I redo this in a linux environment? Yes. I would have to write my own custom GUI and browser to do it, but I'm confident with enough effort, it could be done. Maybe the answer is even easier and it would just be "Hey, port photon to linux along with its browser and we've got the same thing"
You've gone off and made the mistake of assuming either that the linux kernel is always going to be way too big or that they put the whole QNX OS on that floppy or that the gui and browser are part of the qnx kernel. I'd be very worried if someone tried to squeeze an unmodified version of Xfree86 into an embedded device -- you think that's what TiVo's using? The jailbait image that I referred to above manages to squeeze a copy of Xfree, Netscape Navigator, Blackbox, and a bunch of other stuff within the 16MB limit. Sure, they were doing stuff like what I did with packing things into compressed archives and loading them into a ramdisk, but I'm confident that with some custom coding, you could do a lot better. (if they didn't build XF86_SVGA without support for anything but the chipset in the i-opener, they probably could've saved some space right there.)
So the better question is can you make a linux kernel that fits in 1.44MB - ((diskspace for gui) + (diskspace for browser) + (diskspace for any necessary commands)). I think you can.
--transiit
If Linux isn't suitable for embedded applications, several groups out there have already proven that it in fact can be made to fit in a nice small space right nicely. IBM's proof of concept linux-on-a-watch is a good example, or the promised linux PDA, Yopy...heck, look at all the people who spent their summer taking the netpliance i-opener, or the websurfer pro and putting linux on them. Sure, plenty of people installed hard drives in those beasts, but there was more than a handful that didn't go that route and just dumped a linux partition image onto the Sandisk disk-on-chip device. Enough people so as to make it practical for a group to make a prefab image known as Jailbait to stick in there under the 16MB limit....with more programs/functionality than netpliance's gimpy little QNX image (btw, for anyone who's itching for another pronunciation war, I pronounce it Kyoo-Enn-Ecks)
So secondary storage isn't a problem...perhaps you're talking about primary storage and the wonderful universe of volatile memory? The i-opener has 32MB. My laptop has less than that, and I've never seen a problem with it. Perhaps you were talking about something like those Xerox copiers that use an embedded linux kernel buried deep inside that I read about a few years ago.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that the behavior of linux on your desktop is going to be the same as linux aimed for a cramped enviroment. Ever tried to see how small you can make a kernel? Try taking out all filesystem support. Or PCI support. Make sure you aren't supporting the old a.out binaries. Or plug and play devices. Or floppy disk drives. Or any IP-related stuff that isn't necessary for a non-server. Most of these devices thus far have excluded ethernet cards, so unless your device is among the first to do so, you won't need it here. How bad do you need the console support on a machine that won't have people ever seeing the console?
So now that you've got your stripped kernel, what if it's too big? Why not go through the source and trim it even more? Who needs a source license and NDA's up the wazoo just to make it work on a prototype platform?
ok, so maybe Linux isn't the answer for everything and everybody...but to make a general statement like "Linux is not really suitable for small embedded applications, since it has a large" (you never actually finished this sentence, it's that vague...) says exactly nothing. Add to that your assumption that these devices have less memory than a fair amount of them do...and we have BLATANT UNPROVED ASSERTIONS! Whee!
Come back when you have some facts to back these up.
-transiit
Add something else to this line of thought: it is legal to disassemble software. After the initial round of legal nastygrams went out, I asked a number of people in the know about the legality of this whole mess, and the common answer was: It is legal to disassemble software. If you use those instructions line for line in another product, that is not protected, but you can dig up the algorithm, reimplement it yourself, and all is fine. The DMCA (DCMA? I don't remember. It's morning) has made some weird restrictions on reverse engineering, but there's no copyrighted information we are accessing, they can't even wave that one around.
So, this lands under contract law -- the sort of thing where they start saying "If you do not agree to these terms, we do not acknowledge your existence and therefore you must vaporize immediately or stop using our product", but even with that in mind, there's still some problems. They've just made changes to a contract nobody agreed to in the first place, which is not available with the product, neither through radio shack or the magazines that sent them to their subscribers.
ZDNet's got a Kevin Poulsen-written article on the Mitnick release here.
(Most of what I know of the Mitnick story comes from Jonathan Littman's book "The Fugitive Game" (which is about as Kevin sympathetic as "Takedown" is self-congradulatory), and the article sounds like Lewis DePayne's pretty Anti-Kevin now -- of course, he's got his own legal problems and probably wants to avoid some of the attention that a former accomplice might bring)
ABC News has (at least as of midnight thursday) a poll on whether hackers should go to jail on their front page. (Not many options though.) They've got the Associated Press story on it here.
Salon's got the same AP story here. (in case you want to look at different banner ads, I guess)
A decent summary of the Miramax flick is here. (interestingly, it lists the Project phase as "In the can" which sounds worse than "On the shelf" as the other articles mention-- which is too bad. I kinda wanted to see the story with a fistfight between Mitnick and Shimomura and everyone on rollerblades and constantly saying "What is the Matrix?")
-transiit
picky, picky.
if you replace the linux kernel with a different version (i.e., 2.0.x to 2.2.x), it's still linux.
if you replace the linux kernel with a third-party alternative, perhaps a bsd kernel, it really isn't linux anymore, is it?
I was trying to think up a good way of saying "if you can replace a component of the operating system, and it's still the same operating system, said component probably isn't part of the operating system.", while avoiding the jeers of "yeah, well, if you replace ie in win98, it isn't really win98 anymore!".
Oh well, guess I can't win.
-transiit
My definition is that an operating system is the piece of software which 1) interacts and controls the hardware and 2) provides the ability for other software to be run without needing to directly control the hardware.
GUI's are thus not part of the operating system. Now would be a good time to dig up the label of "operating enviroment" (I've only heard it attributed to windows 3.x, but the concept is pretty much the same whether you're referring to X, the Presentation Manger/Workplace Shell, etc. The system running underneath is still capable of controlling/interacting with the hardware).
The web browser is an application. Just because they're moving towards becoming the catch-all text presentation system (html/xml, online help, command references, etc. ) does not change the fact that other pieces of independent software are still capable of running without their presence.
My basic rule for determining what is part of the operating system: if you can replace a component with a third-party alternative, with the operating system as a whole still being able to fit the previous definition, it is not part of the OS. Thus, internet explorer is not part of the windows operating system, as you could replace it's html viewing abilities with mozilla, netscape, opera, etc., you could replace it's ability to run java applications with another java-capable browser, or a standalone jvm. There are a wealth of applications that won't care whether or not you have any sort of browser installed. X is not a part of *nix as an operating system, as you could replace it with berlin (or you will have the opportunity as the berlin project makes more progress). Of course, not every alternative has the same feature set as the original, but you are not compromising the abilities of the operating system itself.
-transiit
csh - see shell
/usr/lib) like library, without the last two syllables. The same people pronounce bin as if it were a trashbin, though I've never heard anyone pronounce binary as binnery.
tcsh - tee see shell
(these don't explain why I pronounce sh as ess-aich, or bash as bash (the same as bash, the verb to beat upon something.)
lilo - lie low (and how come so many people I meet pronounce it the same, but would refer to it as the lynn-ucks loader?)
~ - til-dah
# - pound
! - exclamation point.
. - period (except in url's (which I pronounce you-are-ell, not earl))
As for others, I've noticed people at the local lug pronounce SuSE as "Susie" (or Siouxsie, if you prefer), but I've always tried to stick with what I've believed the german pronunciation: soo-sah.
My brother has been trying to convince me that gnome is pronounced guh-nome, not nome. He also thinks I'm odd for pronouncing GNU as gee-enn-you (it's an acronym), not guh-nu. My argument on this one has always been that I don't pronounce IBM as ibb'm either. Debian? (I've head both Debb-ee-enn and Dayb-ee-enn) I pronounce linux and minix the same way. (lye-nicks, my-nicks). I've also heard people say lib (as in
I pronounce gif like gift, and although I've never seen them in the wild myself, there is the graphics file known as JIF, so who cares what's written in the spec. An ambiguity rendered it possibly outdated.
Data -- day-tah, dah-ta? The assumption that you can come up with an official pronunciation if you go for root words doesn't work either. Pine is no-longer elm, but who pronounces it "pinn-ee"? I think it's safe to assume that as long as you can come up with a pronunciation that is somewhat close to the original, you can still get your point across.
Thanks to the internet, illiteracy is no longer a problem. Of course, now we don't know how to talk.
-transiit
perhaps I'll start pronouncing grep greep from now on. either that, or it won't be pearl, it will be peril. =)
This makes me glad. My experience with Hercules doesn't go as far back as to have personally known the monochrome cards, (I didn't venture into the realm of the IBM compatibles until 93), but I've been proud of the Herc. Stingray that I got in 95 (not only one of the finer VLB graphics cards, but the avance logic chipset was supported by X, which meant a relatively painless attempt with a copy of slackware from the back of a book cover) My current box has one of the Herc. Dynamite/128's (with the also well-supported ET6000) and I've had no problems with it, either. The "also-ran" crap that's been floating around in here isn't true: Hercules just wasn't of the general consumer market (even though perhaps they should have been focusing there) , and if I remember correctly, they were doing stuff in the high-end design workstation area.
Anyway, I was worrying that with S3's acquisition of Diamond, and Hercules going under (of course, a search on here returns that Hercules was acquired by Elsa on 8-26-98, and then that Hercules went under a year later, I wasn't sure what the hell was going on), my choices for the next video card would be rather lousy. At least nobody's come up with the bright idea that "Hey, we can churn out winmodems for dirt cheap, why not try the same thing with graphics cards? So what's a few hundred lost cycles anyway?"
-transiit
The only things I found dismaying was the number of sites that use an algorithm for creation of a user id based on your ip address. The other one was x10.com having my name in there (presumably from that firecracker deal they had a while back)
Not a huge deal, just time to update my sblock.conf
-transiit
international standards? oh, yeah, I can see that one:
"'Fuck'? Was ist 'fuck'?"
international standards, my butt. There is no universal code of being offensive. Try pointing with one finger in some cultures.
fwiw, I wasn't disagreeing with the guy because I really, really wanted to go register something like ifuckgoats.org, I just don't believe that the answer is burying our heads in the sand.
euphemisms or complete misinformation aren't the answer either...there's more to it than just trying to defend the offensive names.
-transiit
(and yes, I plan on jumping out in front of your car while you're on your way to work and have to see me and my lame-ass cause.)
Perhaps another oft quoted line "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." is more appropriate. The problem here is that the american judicial system is heavily based on legal precedent, and avoiding that slippery slope fallacy as best I can, each freedom we lose makes it harder to defend our rights.
Sure, we've got the ACLU and the EFF, but their resources only last so far, they can't handle every case in every jurisdiction. Our rights are our responsibility. Hoping somebody else will fight for them is not the answer.
As for ratings, many movie theatres in this country have agreements with the cities they are in stating that they will not show NC-17 rated movies. I'm not sure whether these involve tax breaks or bending the zoning ordinances, but in the name of community standards, these things do happen. When you factor in the faceless and unaccountable MPAA, we see ourselves ending up with a mess...The first few submissions of Clerks, NC-17 due to language, the first few submissions of South Park, NC-17 for just about every reason under the sun. Are you advocating a similar system for websites? Will you be upset when server-based filtering software becomes the norm with ISPs instead of the exception?
You want to know what the Nazi's have to do with domain names? Let me give you another quote "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
"Oh, so I can try out linux without full committment."...
..."Alright, I downloaded it, ran the installer, clicked the icon and now I'm trying out linux."...
..."Hey, this linux stuff is swell, I'm really enjoying it and I read about how it's actually running slower because it's using UMSDOS...I'll just wipe my drive and start from scratch!"...
..."um, where'd that installer icon go?"...
...thud.
Perhaps more effort should be spent on making feature-complete distributions that exist on a cd for demos and evaluation, and just all around more robust and intuitive (or at least informative*) linux-native installers. The idea is interesting, but if the FUD-wranglers are right about linux support being sparse, psychotic hybrid win95/linux installations aren't going to make things any easier. I'm not as concerned about linux doing weird things to windows, I'd just hate to see things like "Ever since I installed IE5.1, my 'Reboot to Linux' icon just spawns a window with the microsoft website..."
-transiit
* informative - without giving a full lecture at each step of an installation, how will a new user decide if they want package foo? (or for that matter, foo-development)
I think I dislike the idea of how people use all this information they've been busy tracking. I can imagine people yelling at their pizza delivery guy because they saw their call was #3 in the queue, but after tracking the guy's route, they found he delivered the food out of order. Anyone who has worked any sort of customer service will likely recognize the behavior.
The concept is a fun idea, but there comes a point in which too much information becomes too much.
Time to fire up gnuplot...I've been keeping track of how often I've been checking slashdot daily.
In the meantime, check out the California Highway Patrol dispatch page.