Some people think so. I'll lay money that some of the people in Chicago and New York expressing outrage at the attack on the WTC have given money to the IRA to use to buy semtex to murder British civilians.
For that matter, when bin Laden was attacking Soviets, he was a "good guy", now he's a "bad guy". Ditto Saddam Hussein and the Iran-Iraq war.
None of the US millitary or government officials supplying Iran with weapons, a country then considered a rogue state backing terrorism by the US, recieved more than a slap on the wrist. And when they supplied the Contras with weapons, they weren't supplying terrorists, they were supplying freedom fighters. Apparently freedom fighters massacre villages full of peasants, but aren't terrorists.
When Mossad murdered a Swedish diplomat, the USA didn't launch cruise missiles at Israel for acts of government-sponsored terrorism, nor when Ariel Sharon arranged for the massacre of unarmed Lebanese (a war crime he was convicted for in Israel).
For that matter, attacks on off-duty servicemen resulted in the bombing of Libya. The French Resistancce did the same thing, and I don't see too many people lining up to condemn them.
Whether someone is a terrorist or a freedom fighter is often a question of who you ask, not what they do, sadly. There'd probably be fewer dead innocents if that wasn't the case.
Not a theoretical scenario, either - Echelon and French security networks have both been used to pass commercial information to "friendly" companies. NSA and CIA apologists put some time into defending using national security systems to plunder allied country's companies and provide the details to US companies.
Perhaps if the spooks were doing their job instead of making Lockheed shareholders richer, there might be fewer corpses in NYC.
But that's alright, just give them more money and remove those pesky Congressional oversights that were put in place to try and stop the CIA hiring terroists and funding dictatorships. Then we can go back to the good ol' days of the CIA funding the likes of the Shah of Iran. That didn't have any downside, did it?
Perhaps you ought to spend some time reading US history, focusing on government agencies who are supposed to be involved in law enforcement and the like.
During the time J Edgar Hoover headed the FBI, which was founded to focus on interstate crime, he refused to allow it to focus on the Mafia, and pronounced on more than one occasion that there was no such thing; all those high-profile Mafia busts of the thirties and forties were by the US IRS, or by State and Local police acting at the behest of District Attornies or Governors.
What did the FBI spend its time on? Un-American activities! The FBI spent most of the Fifties looking for "Communists" while ignoring the Mafia, and most of the Civil Rights era ignoring racial crimes while harrassing and trying to shut down Martin Luther King.
There's plenty of precedent to make you scared of the BFI getting more rights, because they're more likely to come after citizens exercising their democratic rights than criminals or terrorists.
For that matter, the NSA already have a bottomless budget, Echelon, and virtually no oversight. They have nearly limitless powers. Why didn't they notice this? Why would giving the BFI more power, like the NSA, help?
Outside the US, many governments will happily use this pretext to spy on their citizens. The UK has a long and dishonourable history of using terrorist attacks to extend state powers.
And countries that don't do what the US wants will be accused of habouring terrorists. I doubt you'll see the EU questioning Echelon any more, for example. And my own home is unlikely to want the US Pacific Fleet to turn up.
In fact, the main beneficiary of all this are US intelligence and millitary organisations. Poof, no moew hard questions about echelon, or Carniovore. Why you'd want to give more power to the very agencies who've not only failed to protect US Citizens, but actually funded and trained bin Laden is beyond me.
If I were a conspiracy nut, I'd start to wonder if the spooks staged the whole thing.
What, you'd prefer an indiscriminate, all out attack that kills hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people with no connection with the atrocity in question?
Hmm. Sounds kind of like blowing up the World Trade Centre and murdering thousands of people because you dislike the policies of the US government, don't it?
When you buy an album forget that your paying the RIAA tax, your supporting a band that you love.
Yeah, to the tune of maybe a buck per NZD$35 CD. At least when I see Chris Knox at Bodega, I know he gets the whole $10 door charge.
Other venues aren't so good as to let the artist kee the cover charge, but when the likes of TLC can sell millions of albus generating hundreds of millions of dollars, but go broke because they get less money than I do in my day job, and try to keep up the star lifestyle.
The model you're defending is broken, and like most musicians, you keep buying in to it.
(Which isn't to say I think giving your music away under this license is the fix, necessarily. But if you think there's much material difference between releasing your music into the public domain and signing to a record label, you're stupid enough to deserve what they'll do to you...
...is breathtaking to watch. All the little slash-weenies lining up to attack the idea. How dare those damn Russians do anything that isn't being done in the United States! Somebody should stop them in case they're better at it than we are!
As proponents of the Friedman school of voo...err economics like to remind us, a rising tide lifts all boats, economics is not a zero sum game, etc.
Often, early in an industry life cycle, competition is good because it grows the overall market; think of the early PC or automobile markets, where the biggest challenge was not to get a sale from a competitor, but rather to convince people they wanted your product at all.
Now, when you get to a mature market, and you've convinced everyone they need a particular new geegaw, you need to start slitting the other guy's throat. But until then, it's better for him to get a sale (converting people to the idea they want what you both sell) than to have people fialing to enter your area of the market as a customer at all.
As well as the other suggestions advanced, there's the fact that many companies don't even have internal documentation for thei rhardware - they slap something together, a couple of guys write drivers by bugging the hardware engineers, and that's that.
The problem wasn't that IBM wanted licensing for the MCA bus (which was, indeed light years ahead of ISA; on a par with NuBus or Zorro-II/III), but that IBM demanded royalties on every ISA machine people had ever made if they wanted to use MCA pushed other manufacturers down the EISA route.
PCI and VESA didn't enter into it, they both came after that little tiff.
The PC only barely achieved parity with contemporary systems, and PC architecture systems lagged behind contemporaries for over a decade. It wasn't until he mid-ninties, with PCI and 32 bit processors that PC hardware caught up with where the like of the Macintosh and Amiga, never mind real workstations, had been years before.
Even these days, bad architectural decisions made back then still impede progress (look at the mess that is the PC hard drive, or the fact that you still can't run a PC off a serial port).
Not only that, they use Passport as their gateway. Looks like Microsoft have achieved a little more of their ambition to own a cut of everythng anyone does with a computer.
Gee, I wonder if that's tied to the problems people seem to have with WinXP and mp3s...
Were you not paying attention? rms gave specific examples of people building successful businesses off GPLed free software, including Alladdin (GhostScript). There are, of course, numerous other examples most escpecially Cygnus (gcc, cygwin), TrollTech (Qt), and rms himself (who worked as a consultant building and modifying free software for a number of years).
I realise asking people to read the interview rather than just blindly spitting out comments can be asking for too much, but it helps, really.
Well, if the current discussions taking place in linux-kernel are anything to go by, it provides a journalling FS that doesn't corrupt your data, which can't be said of Rieser at the moment.
The ability to get a journaling FS trivially is actually a very useful one. One incentive to use journalling is to avoid long recovery times for big partitions. If you have big partitions, say 100GB, which is easier - finding a spare 100GB while you do a mkfs for resierfs, or simply poking ext2 a bit and magically aquiring ext3 in place?
Moreover, ext3 provides some more journalling choices than Rieser.
RedHat do provide Rieser as an option, and have since 7 as an install-time FS. But there's no way to convert an extisting ext2 partition to RieserFS.
Why is the Internet expected to comply with "basic economic laws"?
The Internet complies with basic economic laws quite nicely, as it happens. The problem that certain people are bleating about is that they do't like the way economics are giving them a spanking. One example of this provided in the article was people whining that in order to get hihgly reliable delivery, they have to build and operate their own internal networks, and that it's too expensive. In other words, what's being complained about it that the network you pay for (with your access fees) doesn't act enough like an ultra-reliable private network for free.
Ta-da! You get what you pay for. If you want a T1 pipe to every consumer, you can either share a network and amortise the cost across all the users (making it cheap, but also with no preferential treatment), or you can buy everyone a T1 to view your content.
This is an attempt to create a broadcast style economy, where largely artificial scarcity is enforced for the benefit of a handful of companies; think broadcast TV or radio. A one-way relationship rigged to exclude small players so as to exclude economic norms like free market competition.
It's the analogue of businesses that like a free market for employees when they can drive down wages for assembly line workers, and then squeal like stuck pigs when it allows scarce network engineers to charge like senior executives...
And there's the other reason: Solaris runs like crap on older systems. I know people who love Solaris but use OpenBSD on their older SPARC systems, because Solaris 7/8 would run like a dog.
Solaris is engineered for the high end. It makes compromises that hurt the low end.
Well, then, as public officials performing a public function in accordance with prevailing laws and regulations, they should have no problem with being recorded in any form.
Answer me the simple question: Will this make it harder for police officer who do not abuse their power (IE, the vast, vast majority) to perform their job?
Why should it? As police are so fond of saying when asking for draconian new powers and tools, if they're innocent, why would they have anything to fear?
AMD have had MP technology in their processors for a long, long time, including the K6. It's just no-one built motherboards for it. The Athlon series has been the first time they'rve had the strength to do their own motherboards, too.
Isn't it interesting that at the same time the.au government is pushing to give its thugs, sorry, security forces, the right to attack systems, so are the governments of.uk and.nz. And the FBI is pushing for Carnivore.
Don't you love the governments of the "free world" conspiring to legalise attacks on the citizenry by covert organisations?
It's just started being rerun 6 nights a week in New Zealand. I'm amazed how well it holds up - most of the series I remember fondly from my childhood (6 Million Dollar Man, Buck Rodgers, et al) look like crap when I rewatch them, but B7 still looks fine. I guess that's what solid scriptwriting and competant actors having fun will do for you.
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Some people think so. I'll lay money that some of the people in Chicago and New York expressing outrage at the attack on the WTC have given money to the IRA to use to buy semtex to murder British civilians.
For that matter, when bin Laden was attacking Soviets, he was a "good guy", now he's a "bad guy". Ditto Saddam Hussein and the Iran-Iraq war.
None of the US millitary or government officials supplying Iran with weapons, a country then considered a rogue state backing terrorism by the US, recieved more than a slap on the wrist. And when they supplied the Contras with weapons, they weren't supplying terrorists, they were supplying freedom fighters. Apparently freedom fighters massacre villages full of peasants, but aren't terrorists.
When Mossad murdered a Swedish diplomat, the USA didn't launch cruise missiles at Israel for acts of government-sponsored terrorism, nor when Ariel Sharon arranged for the massacre of unarmed Lebanese (a war crime he was convicted for in Israel).
For that matter, attacks on off-duty servicemen resulted in the bombing of Libya. The French Resistancce did the same thing, and I don't see too many people lining up to condemn them.
Whether someone is a terrorist or a freedom fighter is often a question of who you ask, not what they do, sadly. There'd probably be fewer dead innocents if that wasn't the case.
Not a theoretical scenario, either - Echelon and French security networks have both been used to pass commercial information to "friendly" companies. NSA and CIA apologists put some time into defending using national security systems to plunder allied country's companies and provide the details to US companies.
Perhaps if the spooks were doing their job instead of making Lockheed shareholders richer, there might be fewer corpses in NYC.
But that's alright, just give them more money and remove those pesky Congressional oversights that were put in place to try and stop the CIA hiring terroists and funding dictatorships. Then we can go back to the good ol' days of the CIA funding the likes of the Shah of Iran. That didn't have any downside, did it?
A war which, according to your President is a "New kind of war" which will "last a long time."
Kids today. Never teach 'em history.
Perhaps you ought to spend some time reading US history, focusing on government agencies who are supposed to be involved in law enforcement and the like.
During the time J Edgar Hoover headed the FBI, which was founded to focus on interstate crime, he refused to allow it to focus on the Mafia, and pronounced on more than one occasion that there was no such thing; all those high-profile Mafia busts of the thirties and forties were by the US IRS, or by State and Local police acting at the behest of District Attornies or Governors.
What did the FBI spend its time on? Un-American activities! The FBI spent most of the Fifties looking for "Communists" while ignoring the Mafia, and most of the Civil Rights era ignoring racial crimes while harrassing and trying to shut down Martin Luther King.
There's plenty of precedent to make you scared of the BFI getting more rights, because they're more likely to come after citizens exercising their democratic rights than criminals or terrorists.
For that matter, the NSA already have a bottomless budget, Echelon, and virtually no oversight. They have nearly limitless powers. Why didn't they notice this? Why would giving the BFI more power, like the NSA, help?
Outside the US, many governments will happily use this pretext to spy on their citizens. The UK has a long and dishonourable history of using terrorist attacks to extend state powers.
And countries that don't do what the US wants will be accused of habouring terrorists. I doubt you'll see the EU questioning Echelon any more, for example. And my own home is unlikely to want the US Pacific Fleet to turn up.
In fact, the main beneficiary of all this are US intelligence and millitary organisations. Poof, no moew hard questions about echelon, or Carniovore. Why you'd want to give more power to the very agencies who've not only failed to protect US Citizens, but actually funded and trained bin Laden is beyond me.
If I were a conspiracy nut, I'd start to wonder if the spooks staged the whole thing.
What, you'd prefer an indiscriminate, all out attack that kills hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people with no connection with the atrocity in question?
Hmm. Sounds kind of like blowing up the World Trade Centre and murdering thousands of people because you dislike the policies of the US government, don't it?
Yeah, to the tune of maybe a buck per NZD$35 CD. At least when I see Chris Knox at Bodega, I know he gets the whole $10 door charge.
Other venues aren't so good as to let the artist kee the cover charge, but when the likes of TLC can sell millions of albus generating hundreds of millions of dollars, but go broke because they get less money than I do in my day job, and try to keep up the star lifestyle.
The model you're defending is broken, and like most musicians, you keep buying in to it.
(Which isn't to say I think giving your music away under this license is the fix, necessarily. But if you think there's much material difference between releasing your music into the public domain and signing to a record label, you're stupid enough to deserve what they'll do to you...
...is breathtaking to watch. All the little slash-weenies lining up to attack the idea. How dare those damn Russians do anything that isn't being done in the United States! Somebody should stop them in case they're better at it than we are!
It's a pretty revolting spectacle, really.
An investor does not need to own the company to control it. If you followed the ArsDigita saga, you'd see that a small stake, sharewise (
Autodesk rejected external funding when it found precisely these sorts of fishhooks in every contract they looked at.
As proponents of the Friedman school of voo...err economics like to remind us, a rising tide lifts all boats, economics is not a zero sum game, etc.
Often, early in an industry life cycle, competition is good because it grows the overall market; think of the early PC or automobile markets, where the biggest challenge was not to get a sale from a competitor, but rather to convince people they wanted your product at all.
Now, when you get to a mature market, and you've convinced everyone they need a particular new geegaw, you need to start slitting the other guy's throat. But until then, it's better for him to get a sale (converting people to the idea they want what you both sell) than to have people fialing to enter your area of the market as a customer at all.
As well as the other suggestions advanced, there's the fact that many companies don't even have internal documentation for thei rhardware - they slap something together, a couple of guys write drivers by bugging the hardware engineers, and that's that.
Not IIRC correctly - loopholes in BM's patents alowed cloning of the XT and AT buses.
The problem wasn't that IBM wanted licensing for the MCA bus (which was, indeed light years ahead of ISA; on a par with NuBus or Zorro-II/III), but that IBM demanded royalties on every ISA machine people had ever made if they wanted to use MCA pushed other manufacturers down the EISA route.
PCI and VESA didn't enter into it, they both came after that little tiff.
The PC only barely achieved parity with contemporary systems, and PC architecture systems lagged behind contemporaries for over a decade. It wasn't until he mid-ninties, with PCI and 32 bit processors that PC hardware caught up with where the like of the Macintosh and Amiga, never mind real workstations, had been years before.
Even these days, bad architectural decisions made back then still impede progress (look at the mess that is the PC hard drive, or the fact that you still can't run a PC off a serial port).
Not only that, they use Passport as their gateway. Looks like Microsoft have achieved a little more of their ambition to own a cut of everythng anyone does with a computer.
Gee, I wonder if that's tied to the problems people seem to have with WinXP and mp3s...
Were you not paying attention? rms gave specific examples of people building successful businesses off GPLed free software, including Alladdin (GhostScript). There are, of course, numerous other examples most escpecially Cygnus (gcc, cygwin), TrollTech (Qt), and rms himself (who worked as a consultant building and modifying free software for a number of years).
I realise asking people to read the interview rather than just blindly spitting out comments can be asking for too much, but it helps, really.
Well, if the current discussions taking place in linux-kernel are anything to go by, it provides a journalling FS that doesn't corrupt your data, which can't be said of Rieser at the moment.
The ability to get a journaling FS trivially is actually a very useful one. One incentive to use journalling is to avoid long recovery times for big partitions. If you have big partitions, say 100GB, which is easier - finding a spare 100GB while you do a mkfs for resierfs, or simply poking ext2 a bit and magically aquiring ext3 in place?
Moreover, ext3 provides some more journalling choices than Rieser.
RedHat do provide Rieser as an option, and have since 7 as an install-time FS. But there's no way to convert an extisting ext2 partition to RieserFS.
The Internet complies with basic economic laws quite nicely, as it happens. The problem that certain people are bleating about is that they do't like the way economics are giving them a spanking. One example of this provided in the article was people whining that in order to get hihgly reliable delivery, they have to build and operate their own internal networks, and that it's too expensive. In other words, what's being complained about it that the network you pay for (with your access fees) doesn't act enough like an ultra-reliable private network for free.
Ta-da! You get what you pay for. If you want a T1 pipe to every consumer, you can either share a network and amortise the cost across all the users (making it cheap, but also with no preferential treatment), or you can buy everyone a T1 to view your content.
This is an attempt to create a broadcast style economy, where largely artificial scarcity is enforced for the benefit of a handful of companies; think broadcast TV or radio. A one-way relationship rigged to exclude small players so as to exclude economic norms like free market competition.
It's the analogue of businesses that like a free market for employees when they can drive down wages for assembly line workers, and then squeal like stuck pigs when it allows scarce network engineers to charge like senior executives...
And there's the other reason: Solaris runs like crap on older systems. I know people who love Solaris but use OpenBSD on their older SPARC systems, because Solaris 7/8 would run like a dog.
Solaris is engineered for the high end. It makes compromises that hurt the low end.
Why should it? As police are so fond of saying when asking for draconian new powers and tools, if they're innocent, why would they have anything to fear?
AMD have had MP technology in their processors for a long, long time, including the K6. It's just no-one built motherboards for it. The Athlon series has been the first time they'rve had the strength to do their own motherboards, too.
Yeah. So slow Sourceforge runs faster.
Perhaps you should read some Roman history. Stragner things than the plot of Gladiator happened in the Empire's history.
Isn't it interesting that at the same time the .au government is pushing to give its thugs, sorry, security forces, the right to attack systems, so are the governments of .uk and .nz. And the FBI is pushing for Carnivore.
Don't you love the governments of the "free world" conspiring to legalise attacks on the citizenry by covert organisations?
It's just started being rerun 6 nights a week in New Zealand. I'm amazed how well it holds up - most of the series I remember fondly from my childhood (6 Million Dollar Man, Buck Rodgers, et al) look like crap when I rewatch them, but B7 still looks fine. I guess that's what solid scriptwriting and competant actors having fun will do for you.