How come Debian has such a PITA installer? Mandrake was nice, however, OpenBSD and FreeBSD have mega-top notch installers. Easy to use, easy to configure, just say "go".
OpenBSD has an easy installer? I'd almost agree with you, save for one thing. Its impossible to install it without having to deal with the fun disklabel editor. Now, its a capable and efficient tool, but easy to use it is not (or even halfway coherent, if you haven't used it before). There is nothing comparably obtuse in debian, even dselect (which you don't have to use, if you just select the prepackaged sets and then install/uninstall what you want with apt later).
Now FreeBSD I agree with. Its absolutely intuitive and extremely easy to use, and yet its still text-based and has reasonable system requirements and no dangerous (ie, can crash the installer) hardware autodetection. But you know what...if you like the FreeBSD installer, you should also like Slackware very much. They have a similar look and feel. The only definite advantage to FreeBSD is the dependency checking in the package install section. Then again, there are very clear philosophical reasons that Slack DOESN'T do that, and if you follow the instructions, its not that big an issue in the installer.
But now with SO MANY shared libs and other dependencies, it gets to be a major pain in the ass to get one package then have to go get 15 other libs to get it to work. RPM solves all that, and I've come to accept binary distributions as making sense
This problem, really, doesn't exist. Its more a problem with most binary packages out there than with the build requirements of most software. Even the most demanding software will still build on a relatively old glibc 2.1/egcs 2.91.66 system if only a few things (gnome, kde libraries, for instance) are updated to relatively modern versions.
With binaries its a much worse problem. Do you notice how many RH/Mandrake/etc. users post to forums or newsgroup asking "where can I get glibc 2.2.4 so that i can install the latest XChat", because the only package they can find is built against the latest version of their respective distribution. If they were to build from source they could easily install it without updating a single thing.
I play with NetBSD today for the same reason. The default install doesn't even set up networking for you.
Thats not true! Maybe you don't have to, but if you do the net install it will configure your network adapter in order that it can fetch the base system.
In fact I would rate the NetBSD installer as quite straightforward. Unlike OpenBSD, you do not have to mess around with the disklabel editor, which removes the one truly scary bit of the installation. The real fun begins once you reboot.
(/me remembers spending 20 minutes trying in vain to add my user to the "wheel" group in order to su and install the pkgsrc tree so I could get lynx. This was after several years of using FreeBSD, Slack and Debian...I thought I knew what I was doing...but no)
I think it'd be great for Lotus to open the source to SmartSuite
This would be kind of silly and wouldn't benefit the Linux community at all. SmartSuite is all Win32, and even the OS/2 port was partly done using a windows-compatibility library (this forms the basis for Project Odin, actually). Mind you, I used Ami Pro in the early 90s, and if quality really mattered, I believe strongly that it would be the dominant word processor right now. But this wouldn't accomplish anything. It would be far better for IBM to support the existing *nix office software efforts.
It seems to me that the only reason they didn't use a NVIDIA card which is far superior to the ATI Radion is politics of free-beer vs open source.
No, there are actually very practical reasons to avoid nVidia having nothing to do with the driver. See, gaming wasn't a priority with that system. And a 21" monitor was used specifically so it could be run at 2048x1536. The vast majority of cards using nVidia chipsets have unacceptably poor 2d quality, such that using them at 2048x1536 with an expensive monitor would be rather painful. Their choice, the ATI Radeon, is quite sensible -- they have much better 2d quality, and 3d speed which is nearly as good. The fact that it has extremely good, integrated, non-proprietary drivers is a bonux.
Actually, if 3d was less of a priority, the best choice for a system like that would be the even slower, but sharper, Matrox G450.
Mozilla is basically licensed this way. All code is licensed under the GPL and LGPL, and also the Mozilla Public License. So, when used under GPL/LGPL terms, it is totally compatible with other GPL/LGPL free software, and when used under MPL terms, AOL can incorporate it into the proprietary Netscape product.
The mwave driver isn't necessarily a sign of things to come (although the open-source lucent driver may be finished eventually). IBM has been very good about opening the specs to their hardware (especially as no modern IBM systems use the mwave), and furthermore, this driver was literally under development for years.
Because of the amount of the functionality of these things, especially newer PCI ones, that is done in software, and especially how much of it is patented by the various soft-modem developers (conexant, lucent, pctel), its a better bet just to grit your teeth and use the binary drivers.
If I want a server, I use a real UNIX. Real UNIX already come with their own Desktop Environments. They work.
I find it highly unlikely that you would be running X, and the standard DE of most commercial unices, CDE, on any kind of server.
Moreover, you can get CDE for Linux. Its available from someone for $100 or something. No one uses it, because it has been surpassed by the free alternatives, GNOME and KDE. That is why Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, et. al. are going to ship with GNOME by default in the near future.
what distro of linux do you use that automatically installs and configures drivers for new hardware upon booting?
The RH-based distros have kudzu, which detects hardware changes and (theoretically) configures it and loads the proper driver. I've seen it in action on a friends computer running mandrake...if you have a stock kernel with all the modules compiled, it actually does work pretty well with standard hardware. But yeah, if you change your hardware it will come up during the boot process and ask to to configure it.
Of course when it doesn't work you're arguably worse off than doing it manually, because you have to figure out how to undo whatever changes it makes, prevent it from trying to set up the hardware again, and then configure it yourself. Sort of like windows.
Don't know what driver you were trying. X 4.1.0 supports the r128 out of the proverbial box. Just compile the relevant kernel modules, and you're good to go. The only hang up for me was mesa version (had the sw rendering libraries installed, not the ones from the XF86 package, so even though dri was working no program used it...)...but if you are using a clean install of 4.1.0, you should have the right version.
I started using GNOME around 1.0. I picked it because of the eye candy -- it crashed more often and was slower than KDE 1.1, but both were slow enough and crashed enough on my Cyrix 6x86 that I wasn't too concerned with that.
I was really impressed with GNOME 1.2. Along with improvements to enlightenment (I kept using it even after Sawfish became the default -- it is "small and light" only compared to E, and it lacks all the eye candy), it became quite stable and customizable.
1.4 was not a major improvement. I couldn't ever get Nautilus to work on Red Hat 6.x, which I was still using (thanks to Ximian's excellent update system). And gmc was going nowhere. And other than Nautilus little else was changed about 1.4. At the same time, KDE 2 was improving rapidly. I installed the core components of 2.1 in order to use Konqueror as browser, and was quite impressed with the overall feel of it.
When I finally decided to install a new distro (Slackware 8) I went with KDE 2, mainly to get a feel for it. I didn't really look back...of course, it didn't help that I couldn't get the default gnome installation to run Nautilus on startup (even when you can get it to work, it doesn't feel very well integrated with the rest of the desktop). But although I use it, and like it, I really dispute the argument that it has totally supplanted GNOME, and GNOME has no longer any purpose.
Because I basically use KDE as a front end to GNOME and GTK applications. Its true that a few -- XChat, GIMP, GFTP and Abiword -- do not require GNOME, others -- Galeon, Evolution, Pan,to name a few, are completely dependent on GNOME. And visually KDE is still behind, and it doesn't quite have the themability that E/GNOME did. It seems like all the ugly E, Sawmill and GTK themes have been ported to KDE, but I still can't make it look like this.
And no (referring to screenshot), that useful XMMS panel control has no KDE equivalent. Neither does mini-commander, the box next to the clock for entering commands. And that system monitor? Thats Gkrellm, it uses GTK. I hope GNOME 2.0 is much improved...as you can tell, I would like to use it again.
No it doesn't! It emulates the bios and hardware devices, but it doesn't need to emulate the x86 chip. It only runs on systems that already have one. If it did, don't you think there would be a solaris or mac os port of it? Or, moreover, since it does run on x86 chips only, why ever would they write an x86 emulator for the x86*?
And the fact that you can run "any os" on it (although this isn't strictly true -- they only officially test and support it on certain OS's, and I believe they actually dropped support for one of the BSDs recently due to lack of demand) does not mean it must emulate the processor. If it provides a complete, standard BIOS implementation along with a way to emulate direct access to devices, it will of course be able to in theory run any OS.
* - yes, I am aware of the PA-RISC emulator for PA-RISC HP wrote experimentally which resulted in speed-ups under certain situations. This is cool technology, but VMWare doesn't need to use it to do what it does -- and don't you think if they were doing something like that, they would advertise that fact quite prominently (assuming it results in improved performance).
Wow and just imagine how brutally slow it is. I think it would have been a better investment of time to make a portable PPC emulator. Slower than this, true. But a lot more useful.
This is for PPC Linux. It functions like VMWare or Win4Lin under x86 linux, running a virtual MacOS session inside Linux. It doesn't do any processor emulation.
Without confidence in the viability of mp3's, the players will not do well.
The "viability" of the mp3 format has nothing to do with its acceptance of it or lack thereof by the recording industry. The have NEVER supported it, and are unlikely ever to. It is the de facto standard because of piracy, of course. Even before the Napster fad came along, record companies were trying to push sales of three-dollar-a-song files in crap, proprietary, "secure" formats like liquid audio. Then something equivalent came along, for free, and naturally people preferred that price. You will always, no matter what encumberances are put on future recorded music, be able to find it pirated, and the pirated files will always be mp3. Hence, it will be valid.
The patent issue actually is only important if you plan on buying and selling them...most pirated, free mp3s nowadays seem to be made either with the "hacked" radium FhG codec (which is clearly illegal) or LAME, which because it produces unlicensed mp3s is at least of questionable legality. But anyway you will never have to pay for files made with them, so the patent-free ogg format doesn't seem to have much of an opening where it counts.
If it isn't time associated, you can't mail it any other way.
These laws may exist. But usually sending things USPS priority is FASTER than either UPS or FedEx Ground (not 2-day or any of that junk). So why haven't I been locked up for sending things UPS Ground?
If the airlines must all be subsidized, why not have a state airline? If the government pays the bills, why shouldn't they own the company?
The key is making sure the large investors and executives get their cut of the government money. There is nothing wrong with subsidizing business, in fact in various ways (exclusionary trade policies, defense spending, sports stadiums, etc.) its done all the time here. If you can work out a way where the current owners and executives, within the public apparatus, can skim more money off of the top than they do right now as "private" companies it would be an easy sell to the business community and conservative establishment.
The problem is, with one slanted opinion comes many other in support of it and I believe that this comment destroys the credibility of the information gained from this person's view
No it doesn't! And you have been hiding under a rock if you "learned" anything RMS presented in his little article for the first time. What he was doing was stating a number of concerns which have ALREADY BEEN RAISED REPEATEDLY by other sources, but which he, like many others, is concerned about. Just do a search of slashdot the past few days. The congressional resolution, proposed laws etc. are all a matter of public record. What exactly Stallman's personal political views are do not change the fact that you can verify the validity of everything he said through independent sources. Maybe, for instance, you could read ESR's recent diatribe on similar issues. Its a lot longer, and raises many similar issues. Then he proposes expanded ownership of concealed firearms as the solution! Maybe that fits with your personal world view more closesly.
In fact, checking the facts yourself is really the way to deal with this. Don't look for a "non-partisan" analysis of any of this. The "non-partisan" media is where most of the clamoring for the suppression of rights and an immediate retaliation (notwithstanding that it isn't clear who did this). Don't assume because of how something sounds that it is true or untrue...find out for yourself.
I don't think I'd believe him even if he personally flew to New York and started digging in the rubble with his bare hands to assist the recovery workers.
And how can you be sure it was him (other than that the suspected hijackers all came from somewhere in the middle east)? Isn't one of the foundations of the "free" world the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
Remember, this guy usually claims responsibility for everything he does and then some. Furthermore, he wants to be a martyr, and he wants to start a world war. Why ever would he deny it?
Sudan does not and has not exported anything of any consequence for 20 years or more.
Hmm, do you have a source on that? Yes, I am aware of the fact that Sudan is currently under a highly repressive government, oppression of Christians in the South, general state of civil war, etc. Does this preclude a plant funded by wealthy Saudis from being a major source of medicine in Central Africa? No, in fact many of the conditions in Sudan are common to the other states in that region. If you can produce evidence of another local producer of basic medicine in that region, I will gladly revoke that. And there would have been a UN investigation into the effects of the bombing were it not vetoed by the US. That is fact! Would there be a need for an investigation if every nation in Central Africa had a similar facility, or could afford to import what they needed from western drug companies? It would be highly unlikely.
if you believe that the 'independent' media is any less biased than the normal media you are hopelessly naive.
There is no such thing as a lack of bias. I am biased, you are biased, there is bias in everything written or said by a human. The issue is not bias, the issue is truth. There is a consistent pattern of lying and distortion in the popular media, which partly serves to advance the interests of the corporations producing it, and to a certain extent the government also. Now, most of what I would consider the "independent media" also advances a particular perspective, however it is usually one that they make no secret of and it can easily be discerned what is reasonable information and what is opinion. There is a difference between a clearly stated opinion and a lie. Opinions, such as yours and mine, are perfectly harmless. But lies and distortions, if not indicated as such, are unforgiveable. And I hold any source to task for those, regardless of any appearance of "credibility".
Would anything be different if the average US citizen knew that? Or what if the Russian had trained him? Do you really get the feeling that the US public is really worried about whoever did this's life story?
What this magical "American Public" thinks right now is immaterial because their views are based entirely on the biased jingoistic crap on the mass media. Within minutes it was being compared to Pearl Harbor and we were "at war", notwithstanding that even if the ties to bin Laden are correct, this was a criminal act commited by a group of private citizens, not a military attack justifying a military response. In fact your complete denial of causality is the perfect proof of the power of mass media. You admit you don't care who did this or why, and yet you must realize that if not for a century of western meddling dating to World War I, this never would have happened, the WTC would be standing, and thousands of Americans would be alive right now. True, none of this can be changed, but that does not mean that the solution is to perpetuate and even intensify the very conditions that cause attacks such as this. When proper context is not presented, and words like "mindless" and "unprovoked" are repeated endlessly, it plays into the hands of the very people who seek to perpetuate the violence.
We bomb people, and shit happens. Leftists moan. We don't bomb, and instead try to enact pressure via sanctions, and rules elect to let their people starve. And leftists moan.
Again, context. The sanctions were not necessarily a bad idea immediately after the war, and they were, at that time, preferrable to bombing. But after some time, when the extent of the humanitarian disaster became apparent, and it also became apparent that they were not serving their purpose (to displace Hussein), they should have been ended. That they were not, and remain in place, considering the number of people who have now died, is a crime against humanity.
Instead of criticizing the mass media, why not also look within, and maybe not blindly accept and repeat non fact checked forwarded email allegations from some random South American professor as being some legitimate independent media source.
I accept that this could have been incorrect. I believed it had a high probability of truth only because I had seen nothing else to the contrary (conclusive proof that it WAS current). Even if there is a shirt in the footage that could be dated to no earlier than 1995, that still does not prove that it is current. I am willing to accept that what I have stated is not a fact. I am willing to accept that it might have been hasty and ill-thought to post it as such here (although the source I received that information from is usually quite trustworthy). Perhaps if you could consider carefully the facts surrounding this entire situation yourself, instead of continuing your name-calling and specious, deceptive argument, you would find it beneficial.
I find it funny that very
little media has given us a detailed
background of the history and possible
motivations of the terrorists.
Because if they were to do this, they would have to admit a number of things which would undermine the message they are trying to send, such as:
1. Osama bin Laden, the current prime scapegoat, was originally supported by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Most of bin Laden's associates, as well as the others associated with the Taliban regime, were trained and financed by the CIA.
2. If it was bin Laden, the bombing was in response to such things as: the bombing and sanctions against Iraq which may have killed clost to a million innocent civillians, the continued oppression of Palestinian civillians by Israel (recent death toll in the thousands, at least), and the destruction of a Sudanese pharmacutical plant by American cruise missiles, death toll unknown because a UN investigation was blocked by the US, but it was the primary source of vaccines and antibiotics for almost all of Central Africa, so it is possible the death toll is in the ten thousands. It would be difficult to acknowledge these things while at the same time clamoring for retribution against Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., because it would be clear that the attack on america itself was a similar act of desparate retribution.
But rather than explaining anything, the media seems more interested in rallying support for another middle eastern war, which will likely lead to further despicable terrorist attacks on america such as this one, AS WELL AS untold thousands of civillian deaths wherever the american government chooses to attack.
Oh yes, one more thing. The images of Palestinians celebrating in Israel you have seen on the news are most likely fake. In a manner of speaking, anyway. They are from 1991 and unrelated to anything going on currently.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenBSD has an easy installer? I'd almost agree with you, save for one thing. Its impossible to install it without having to deal with the fun disklabel editor. Now, its a capable and efficient tool, but easy to use it is not (or even halfway coherent, if you haven't used it before). There is nothing comparably obtuse in debian, even dselect (which you don't have to use, if you just select the prepackaged sets and then install/uninstall what you want with apt later).
Now FreeBSD I agree with. Its absolutely intuitive and extremely easy to use, and yet its still text-based and has reasonable system requirements and no dangerous (ie, can crash the installer) hardware autodetection. But you know what...if you like the FreeBSD installer, you should also like Slackware very much. They have a similar look and feel. The only definite advantage to FreeBSD is the dependency checking in the package install section. Then again, there are very clear philosophical reasons that Slack DOESN'T do that, and if you follow the instructions, its not that big an issue in the installer.
This problem, really, doesn't exist. Its more a problem with most binary packages out there than with the build requirements of most software. Even the most demanding software will still build on a relatively old glibc 2.1/egcs 2.91.66 system if only a few things (gnome, kde libraries, for instance) are updated to relatively modern versions.
With binaries its a much worse problem. Do you notice how many RH/Mandrake/etc. users post to forums or newsgroup asking "where can I get glibc 2.2.4 so that i can install the latest XChat", because the only package they can find is built against the latest version of their respective distribution. If they were to build from source they could easily install it without updating a single thing.
Thats not true! Maybe you don't have to, but if you do the net install it will configure your network adapter in order that it can fetch the base system.
In fact I would rate the NetBSD installer as quite straightforward. Unlike OpenBSD, you do not have to mess around with the disklabel editor, which removes the one truly scary bit of the installation. The real fun begins once you reboot.
(/me remembers spending 20 minutes trying in vain to add my user to the "wheel" group in order to su and install the pkgsrc tree so I could get lynx. This was after several years of using FreeBSD, Slack and Debian...I thought I knew what I was doing...but no)
This would be kind of silly and wouldn't benefit the Linux community at all. SmartSuite is all Win32, and even the OS/2 port was partly done using a windows-compatibility library (this forms the basis for Project Odin, actually). Mind you, I used Ami Pro in the early 90s, and if quality really mattered, I believe strongly that it would be the dominant word processor right now. But this wouldn't accomplish anything. It would be far better for IBM to support the existing *nix office software efforts.
No, there are actually very practical reasons to avoid nVidia having nothing to do with the driver. See, gaming wasn't a priority with that system. And a 21" monitor was used specifically so it could be run at 2048x1536. The vast majority of cards using nVidia chipsets have unacceptably poor 2d quality, such that using them at 2048x1536 with an expensive monitor would be rather painful. Their choice, the ATI Radeon, is quite sensible -- they have much better 2d quality, and 3d speed which is nearly as good. The fact that it has extremely good, integrated, non-proprietary drivers is a bonux.
Actually, if 3d was less of a priority, the best choice for a system like that would be the even slower, but sharper, Matrox G450.
What popular Linux DE that doesn't also compile on Solaris? I can't think of any worth using.
Mozilla is basically licensed this way. All code is licensed under the GPL and LGPL, and also the Mozilla Public License. So, when used under GPL/LGPL terms, it is totally compatible with other GPL/LGPL free software, and when used under MPL terms, AOL can incorporate it into the proprietary Netscape product.
The mwave driver isn't necessarily a sign of things to come (although the open-source lucent driver may be finished eventually). IBM has been very good about opening the specs to their hardware (especially as no modern IBM systems use the mwave), and furthermore, this driver was literally under development for years.
Because of the amount of the functionality of these things, especially newer PCI ones, that is done in software, and especially how much of it is patented by the various soft-modem developers (conexant, lucent, pctel), its a better bet just to grit your teeth and use the binary drivers.
I find it highly unlikely that you would be running X, and the standard DE of most commercial unices, CDE, on any kind of server.
Moreover, you can get CDE for Linux. Its available from someone for $100 or something. No one uses it, because it has been surpassed by the free alternatives, GNOME and KDE. That is why Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, et. al. are going to ship with GNOME by default in the near future.
The RH-based distros have kudzu, which detects hardware changes and (theoretically) configures it and loads the proper driver. I've seen it in action on a friends computer running mandrake...if you have a stock kernel with all the modules compiled, it actually does work pretty well with standard hardware. But yeah, if you change your hardware it will come up during the boot process and ask to to configure it.
Of course when it doesn't work you're arguably worse off than doing it manually, because you have to figure out how to undo whatever changes it makes, prevent it from trying to set up the hardware again, and then configure it yourself. Sort of like windows.
Don't know what driver you were trying. X 4.1.0 supports the r128 out of the proverbial box. Just compile the relevant kernel modules, and you're good to go. The only hang up for me was mesa version (had the sw rendering libraries installed, not the ones from the XF86 package, so even though dri was working no program used it...)...but if you are using a clean install of 4.1.0, you should have the right version.
I started using GNOME around 1.0. I picked it because of the eye candy -- it crashed more often and was slower than KDE 1.1, but both were slow enough and crashed enough on my Cyrix 6x86 that I wasn't too concerned with that.
I was really impressed with GNOME 1.2. Along with improvements to enlightenment (I kept using it even after Sawfish became the default -- it is "small and light" only compared to E, and it lacks all the eye candy), it became quite stable and customizable.
1.4 was not a major improvement. I couldn't ever get Nautilus to work on Red Hat 6.x, which I was still using (thanks to Ximian's excellent update system). And gmc was going nowhere. And other than Nautilus little else was changed about 1.4. At the same time, KDE 2 was improving rapidly. I installed the core components of 2.1 in order to use Konqueror as browser, and was quite impressed with the overall feel of it.
When I finally decided to install a new distro (Slackware 8) I went with KDE 2, mainly to get a feel for it. I didn't really look back...of course, it didn't help that I couldn't get the default gnome installation to run Nautilus on startup (even when you can get it to work, it doesn't feel very well integrated with the rest of the desktop). But although I use it, and like it, I really dispute the argument that it has totally supplanted GNOME, and GNOME has no longer any purpose.
Because I basically use KDE as a front end to GNOME and GTK applications. Its true that a few -- XChat, GIMP, GFTP and Abiword -- do not require GNOME, others -- Galeon, Evolution, Pan,to name a few, are completely dependent on GNOME. And visually KDE is still behind, and it doesn't quite have the themability that E/GNOME did. It seems like all the ugly E, Sawmill and GTK themes have been ported to KDE, but I still can't make it look like this.
And no (referring to screenshot), that useful XMMS panel control has no KDE equivalent. Neither does mini-commander, the box next to the clock for entering commands. And that system monitor? Thats Gkrellm, it uses GTK. I hope GNOME 2.0 is much improved...as you can tell, I would like to use it again.
No it doesn't! It emulates the bios and hardware devices, but it doesn't need to emulate the x86 chip. It only runs on systems that already have one. If it did, don't you think there would be a solaris or mac os port of it? Or, moreover, since it does run on x86 chips only, why ever would they write an x86 emulator for the x86*?
And the fact that you can run "any os" on it (although this isn't strictly true -- they only officially test and support it on certain OS's, and I believe they actually dropped support for one of the BSDs recently due to lack of demand) does not mean it must emulate the processor. If it provides a complete, standard BIOS implementation along with a way to emulate direct access to devices, it will of course be able to in theory run any OS.
* - yes, I am aware of the PA-RISC emulator for PA-RISC HP wrote experimentally which resulted in speed-ups under certain situations. This is cool technology, but VMWare doesn't need to use it to do what it does -- and don't you think if they were doing something like that, they would advertise that fact quite prominently (assuming it results in improved performance).
This is for PPC Linux. It functions like VMWare or Win4Lin under x86 linux, running a virtual MacOS session inside Linux. It doesn't do any processor emulation.
The "viability" of the mp3 format has nothing to do with its acceptance of it or lack thereof by the recording industry. The have NEVER supported it, and are unlikely ever to. It is the de facto standard because of piracy, of course. Even before the Napster fad came along, record companies were trying to push sales of three-dollar-a-song files in crap, proprietary, "secure" formats like liquid audio. Then something equivalent came along, for free, and naturally people preferred that price. You will always, no matter what encumberances are put on future recorded music, be able to find it pirated, and the pirated files will always be mp3. Hence, it will be valid.
The patent issue actually is only important if you plan on buying and selling them...most pirated, free mp3s nowadays seem to be made either with the "hacked" radium FhG codec (which is clearly illegal) or LAME, which because it produces unlicensed mp3s is at least of questionable legality. But anyway you will never have to pay for files made with them, so the patent-free ogg format doesn't seem to have much of an opening where it counts.
These laws may exist. But usually sending things USPS priority is FASTER than either UPS or FedEx Ground (not 2-day or any of that junk). So why haven't I been locked up for sending things UPS Ground?
The key is making sure the large investors and executives get their cut of the government money. There is nothing wrong with subsidizing business, in fact in various ways (exclusionary trade policies, defense spending, sports stadiums, etc.) its done all the time here. If you can work out a way where the current owners and executives, within the public apparatus, can skim more money off of the top than they do right now as "private" companies it would be an easy sell to the business community and conservative establishment.
No it doesn't! And you have been hiding under a rock if you "learned" anything RMS presented in his little article for the first time. What he was doing was stating a number of concerns which have ALREADY BEEN RAISED REPEATEDLY by other sources, but which he, like many others, is concerned about. Just do a search of slashdot the past few days. The congressional resolution, proposed laws etc. are all a matter of public record. What exactly Stallman's personal political views are do not change the fact that you can verify the validity of everything he said through independent sources. Maybe, for instance, you could read ESR's recent diatribe on similar issues. Its a lot longer, and raises many similar issues. Then he proposes expanded ownership of concealed firearms as the solution! Maybe that fits with your personal world view more closesly.
In fact, checking the facts yourself is really the way to deal with this. Don't look for a "non-partisan" analysis of any of this. The "non-partisan" media is where most of the clamoring for the suppression of rights and an immediate retaliation (notwithstanding that it isn't clear who did this). Don't assume because of how something sounds that it is true or untrue...find out for yourself.
And how can you be sure it was him (other than that the suspected hijackers all came from somewhere in the middle east)? Isn't one of the foundations of the "free" world the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
Remember, this guy usually claims responsibility for everything he does and then some. Furthermore, he wants to be a martyr, and he wants to start a world war. Why ever would he deny it?
No, actually he received very little. He was, however, sought out as a source of financing by the CIA as he himself has quite a bit of money.
No. Are you familiar with the word SUDAN? It is a country in Central Africa.
Hmm, do you have a source on that? Yes, I am aware of the fact that Sudan is currently under a highly repressive government, oppression of Christians in the South, general state of civil war, etc. Does this preclude a plant funded by wealthy Saudis from being a major source of medicine in Central Africa? No, in fact many of the conditions in Sudan are common to the other states in that region. If you can produce evidence of another local producer of basic medicine in that region, I will gladly revoke that. And there would have been a UN investigation into the effects of the bombing were it not vetoed by the US. That is fact! Would there be a need for an investigation if every nation in Central Africa had a similar facility, or could afford to import what they needed from western drug companies? It would be highly unlikely.
There is no such thing as a lack of bias. I am biased, you are biased, there is bias in everything written or said by a human. The issue is not bias, the issue is truth. There is a consistent pattern of lying and distortion in the popular media, which partly serves to advance the interests of the corporations producing it, and to a certain extent the government also. Now, most of what I would consider the "independent media" also advances a particular perspective, however it is usually one that they make no secret of and it can easily be discerned what is reasonable information and what is opinion. There is a difference between a clearly stated opinion and a lie. Opinions, such as yours and mine, are perfectly harmless. But lies and distortions, if not indicated as such, are unforgiveable. And I hold any source to task for those, regardless of any appearance of "credibility".
No, you're right. We bomb schools, hospitals, and pharmaceutical plants here in America. We are civilized(TM) people here.
What this magical "American Public" thinks right now is immaterial because their views are based entirely on the biased jingoistic crap on the mass media. Within minutes it was being compared to Pearl Harbor and we were "at war", notwithstanding that even if the ties to bin Laden are correct, this was a criminal act commited by a group of private citizens, not a military attack justifying a military response. In fact your complete denial of causality is the perfect proof of the power of mass media. You admit you don't care who did this or why, and yet you must realize that if not for a century of western meddling dating to World War I, this never would have happened, the WTC would be standing, and thousands of Americans would be alive right now. True, none of this can be changed, but that does not mean that the solution is to perpetuate and even intensify the very conditions that cause attacks such as this. When proper context is not presented, and words like "mindless" and "unprovoked" are repeated endlessly, it plays into the hands of the very people who seek to perpetuate the violence.
Again, context. The sanctions were not necessarily a bad idea immediately after the war, and they were, at that time, preferrable to bombing. But after some time, when the extent of the humanitarian disaster became apparent, and it also became apparent that they were not serving their purpose (to displace Hussein), they should have been ended. That they were not, and remain in place, considering the number of people who have now died, is a crime against humanity.
I accept that this could have been incorrect. I believed it had a high probability of truth only because I had seen nothing else to the contrary (conclusive proof that it WAS current). Even if there is a shirt in the footage that could be dated to no earlier than 1995, that still does not prove that it is current. I am willing to accept that what I have stated is not a fact. I am willing to accept that it might have been hasty and ill-thought to post it as such here (although the source I received that information from is usually quite trustworthy). Perhaps if you could consider carefully the facts surrounding this entire situation yourself, instead of continuing your name-calling and specious, deceptive argument, you would find it beneficial.
See CounterPunch
Look at the fourth heading down, titled "Least Credible News Footage".
Because if they were to do this, they would have to admit a number of things which would undermine the message they are trying to send, such as:
1. Osama bin Laden, the current prime scapegoat, was originally supported by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Most of bin Laden's associates, as well as the others associated with the Taliban regime, were trained and financed by the CIA.
2. If it was bin Laden, the bombing was in response to such things as: the bombing and sanctions against Iraq which may have killed clost to a million innocent civillians, the continued oppression of Palestinian civillians by Israel (recent death toll in the thousands, at least), and the destruction of a Sudanese pharmacutical plant by American cruise missiles, death toll unknown because a UN investigation was blocked by the US, but it was the primary source of vaccines and antibiotics for almost all of Central Africa, so it is possible the death toll is in the ten thousands. It would be difficult to acknowledge these things while at the same time clamoring for retribution against Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., because it would be clear that the attack on america itself was a similar act of desparate retribution.
But rather than explaining anything, the media seems more interested in rallying support for another middle eastern war, which will likely lead to further despicable terrorist attacks on america such as this one, AS WELL AS untold thousands of civillian deaths wherever the american government chooses to attack.
Oh yes, one more thing. The images of Palestinians celebrating in Israel you have seen on the news are most likely fake. In a manner of speaking, anyway. They are from 1991 and unrelated to anything going on currently.