this is a direct result of mccain-feingold. the moment you decide to define 'legitimate media', for purposes of granting their political speech exception, you effectively create regulation of all media. once Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court decided that some citizens, based upon their full-time employment, enjoy free speech rights separate from everyone else, how else would you imagine that those speech restrictions be enforced?
the blogosphere cannot become complacent about intrusions like this -- its actually what MSM and our representatives prefer, largely because it enhances their own power and/or kills open source journalism. so there will be no MSM outrage over this -- they want to hold onto their roles as gatekeepers.
spare me the outrage. were there never any affirmative action, you would be completely justified in your anger with people going over your head. but how, given the relative ease with which minorities can obtain admissions and the quota driven EEOC mandates, could you blame someone for questioning you. everyone is aware of the lengths companies go to insure themsleves against discrimination suits, and that certainly includes hiring people who never would be hired unless they were a minority. not knowing anything else about a doctor, would you choose a white one or a black one for a life saving operation? if there were never any affirmative action, then which one would you choose?
just because you would have made it without preferences doesn't mean its true of everyone else at your level.
I'm a little surprised at everyone's shock over the $5 billion claim. The plaintiffs are in no way expecting to get anywhere near that -- it's simply to up the ante in this case of blackmail. Sears set a precendent (not a legal one) well over a decade ago when it was sued for racial discrimination (to the tune of 20 million), won the case, but ended up spending 40 milion in legal fees. Most large businesses have long followed the practice of trying to settle every case that isn't laughable on its face simply because its almost always more expensive to go to court. So when you ask for something like $5 billion, its not because that's supposed to represent any actual damages, it because they want to bludgeon MS into taking the safer route of maybe only parting with 100 million or so. The $5 billion tag automatically labels this suit as dishonest.
It's not a coincidence that the firm representing the plaintiffs also represented Coke in a $1.5 billion discrimination suit. Coke, who's been repeatedly lauded over the years for their efforts at an integrated workforce, was simply floored by the suit. What are they supposed to do but settle? You can't take the chance that a knuckledheaded jury won't be sympathetic to claims of institutional racism. MS is no different, except at least they get to go in front of a judge instead of jury.
i find it amusing that you explain away the administration's position with 'Seems more like a question of Establishmentarianism -- politicians in office like to remain there, and know about both corporate bread-buttering and the importance of appearing reassuringly normal.' It wouldn't be because Napster is blantantly breaking copyright law would it?
of course the DMCA is absurd (and dangerous). of course the MPAA's fight over DeCSS is simple-minded. but i get increasingly frustrated
by the knee-jerk reactions this site has to anything that impedes anything in the digital realm. Napster is nothing if not a well capitalized black market for artists' work. You have to apply the same fundamental property rights to the digital world as you have in the physical world or else all property rights become pointless. downloading songs for free is a hard sell on the 'fair use' provision, and Napster has no other purpose aside from providing a black market.
why should ebay be allowed to sell stuff like tortoise shells and get away with "i'm sorry, we'll try and stop that next time"? if that were a local Kmart, they would've been forced out of business. either do away with property rights laws or at least make them consistent for both the digital and physical worlds.
why would they even bother teaming up? AOL could usurp the market by expanding their use of "keywords". they already control something like 45% of the dialup market, so what's to prevent them from trying to define the standards? just type in "amazon", and maybe you'll find yourself at B&N if they paid enough for that right.
don't like it? what exactly would you do about it?
yeah, its a little far-fetched (but not that far) and the legal wrangling would be a headache, but anytime a company has outlandish market share like AOL does, their "innovations" tend to push the envelope of legality.
how about this -- "So-and-so just wrote us with this piece about how you shouldn't use Debian on a production server. Discuss.
And remember, please refrain from making naughty comments, since it makes us seem like an AOL chatroom, and that's not what the shareholders are looking for out of you. Thanks."
does anyone find this comment from an andover press release this morning a little disturbing?
"Visitors to this co-branded Linux book store can conduct full-text searches across the entire bookstore, preview for-sale books prior to purchase using ibooks.com's patent-pending 'previewing' technology.....
lets see... 850 million for a shell company that is literally nothing more than slashdot (and some neat clip-art cd's), and rob and jeff's stakes are worth about 20 million? bruce twickler and the other execs at andover are geniuses in the clintonian sense of the word. andover is a company with no direction, operating history or any particular expertise, but they can say "andover, the internet's leading linux destination..." in every one of their daily press releases and somehow be valued at 800 times revenue? folks, this is only slightly less nauseating than linuxone.
yep. the copyleft t's are going to stop having the gpl on the back with our next batch and we're doing 3 new/. designs in a little bit (after the current inventory starts dwidling).
Slashdot Mirror
this is a direct result of mccain-feingold. the moment you decide to define 'legitimate media', for purposes of granting their political speech exception, you effectively create regulation of all media. once Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court decided that some citizens, based upon their full-time employment, enjoy free speech rights separate from everyone else, how else would you imagine that those speech restrictions be enforced?
the blogosphere cannot become complacent about intrusions like this -- its actually what MSM and our representatives prefer, largely because it enhances their own power and/or kills open source journalism. so there will be no MSM outrage over this -- they want to hold onto their roles as gatekeepers.
spare me the outrage. were there never any affirmative action, you would be completely justified in your anger with people going over your head. but how, given the relative ease with which minorities can obtain admissions and the quota driven EEOC mandates, could you blame someone for questioning you. everyone is aware of the lengths companies go to insure themsleves against discrimination suits, and that certainly includes hiring people who never would be hired unless they were a minority. not knowing anything else about a doctor, would you choose a white one or a black one for a life saving operation? if there were never any affirmative action, then which one would you choose?
just because you would have made it without preferences doesn't mean its true of everyone else at your level.
I'm a little surprised at everyone's shock over the $5 billion claim. The plaintiffs are in no way expecting to get anywhere near that -- it's simply to up the ante in this case of blackmail. Sears set a precendent (not a legal one) well over a decade ago when it was sued for racial discrimination (to the tune of 20 million), won the case, but ended up spending 40 milion in legal fees. Most large businesses have long followed the practice of trying to settle every case that isn't laughable on its face simply because its almost always more expensive to go to court. So when you ask for something like $5 billion, its not because that's supposed to represent any actual damages, it because they want to bludgeon MS into taking the safer route of maybe only parting with 100 million or so. The $5 billion tag automatically labels this suit as dishonest.
It's not a coincidence that the firm representing the plaintiffs also represented Coke in a $1.5 billion discrimination suit. Coke, who's been repeatedly lauded over the years for their efforts at an integrated workforce, was simply floored by the suit. What are they supposed to do but settle? You can't take the chance that a knuckledheaded jury won't be sympathetic to claims of institutional racism. MS is no different, except at least they get to go in front of a judge instead of jury.
i find it amusing that you explain away the administration's position with 'Seems more like a question of Establishmentarianism -- politicians in office like to remain there, and know about both corporate bread-buttering and the importance of appearing reassuringly normal.' It wouldn't be because Napster is blantantly breaking copyright law would it?
of course the DMCA is absurd (and dangerous). of course the MPAA's fight over DeCSS is simple-minded. but i get increasingly frustrated by the knee-jerk reactions this site has to anything that impedes anything in the digital realm. Napster is nothing if not a well capitalized black market for artists' work. You have to apply the same fundamental property rights to the digital world as you have in the physical world or else all property rights become pointless. downloading songs for free is a hard sell on the 'fair use' provision, and Napster has no other purpose aside from providing a black market.
why should ebay be allowed to sell stuff like tortoise shells and get away with "i'm sorry, we'll try and stop that next time"? if that were a local Kmart, they would've been forced out of business. either do away with property rights laws or at least make them consistent for both the digital and physical worlds.
we compiled in a max connections of 256 into apache and a max of 4000 into mysql, so we're obviously being killed right now.
-neil
copyleft.net
why would they even bother teaming up? AOL could usurp the market by expanding their use of "keywords". they already control something like 45% of the dialup market, so what's to prevent them from trying to define the standards? just type in "amazon", and maybe you'll find yourself at B&N if they paid enough for that right.
don't like it? what exactly would you do about it?
yeah, its a little far-fetched (but not that far) and the legal wrangling would be a headache, but anytime a company has outlandish market share like AOL does, their "innovations" tend to push the envelope of legality.
how about this -- "So-and-so just wrote us with this piece about how you shouldn't use Debian on a production server. Discuss.
And remember, please refrain from making naughty comments, since it makes us seem like an AOL chatroom, and that's not what the shareholders are looking for out of you. Thanks."
does anyone find this comment from an andover press release this morning a little disturbing?
"Visitors to this co-branded Linux book store can conduct full-text searches across the entire bookstore, preview for-sale books prior to purchase using ibooks.com's patent-pending
'previewing' technology.....
lets see... 850 million for a shell company that is literally nothing more than slashdot (and some neat clip-art cd's), and rob and jeff's stakes are worth about 20 million? bruce twickler and the other execs at andover are geniuses in the clintonian sense of the word. andover is a company with no direction, operating history or any particular expertise, but they can say "andover, the internet's leading linux destination ..." in every one of their daily press releases and somehow be valued at 800 times revenue? folks, this is only slightly less nauseating than linuxone.
they're being printed as we speak. they'll be up on friday.
yep. the copyleft t's are going to stop having the gpl on the back with our next batch and we're doing 3 new /. designs in a little bit (after the current inventory starts dwidling).