As a Linux user (wanting to read a Linux article), I can't click through the Salon day-pass system. It's presented as a Flash(tm) file, version 4, and Macromedia's plugin only supports versions 5 and 6.
Been in exactly this situation about three years ago, except that as chief geek I owned half the company. I said I was leaving, and did a deal with the suits that they would buy me out for UKP25,000. Two months later suits said they couldn't pay me and would I buy them out - so I offered them UKP1 and they accepted. I then gutted all the assets out of the company except one customer account and sold the company on for UKP1 to the consultant who was running that account, but that's another story. We've never looked back - much less stress, much less work (because we're carrying so much less overhead the company doesn't need to earn so much) and we're able to pay ourselves more, not less.
Make sure you have good relationships with key customers and that those customers know which team has the competence to deliver after the split. Also make sure you aren't hit with a non-compete - they're not strictly legal here in the UK but it's still a hassle.
There's no way that the Linux kernel isn't in public domain.
You are absolutely 100% wrong. The Linux kernel is most certainly not in the public domain. It is copyright Linus Torvalds. If the copyright owner chooses to allow you to make copies and to modify them under the terms of the GNU general public license (as he does), that's his privilege under copyright law. It most definitely does not make his work public domain.
Pornography is what we don't want innocent seven year old children looking at.
Utterly useless definition. Given a photograph, how do you determine if it's pornographic or not? Would another person determine differently? You offer a variant of the usual "I'll know it when I see it" criterion, which is not sufficiently well defined to use in a legal setting.
OK, this is where I think the whole of western society (and perhaps the United States most particularly) is sick and weird and different only in degree from the Taliban. We have a very sick, weird attitude to sexuality, and it underlies most of our social problems.
Sexual behaviour is normal behaviour. If it wasn't normal behaviour, we wouldn't exist as a species. Kids learn appropriate behaviour by observation. But western kids never learn appropriate sexual behaviour, because they're never allowed to see it. On the contrary, when they are exposed to images of implied sexuality it's very often in the context of action films where the sexuality is either co-ercive or manipulative.
If the argument was that children ought not to be exposed to images of sexual coercion or sexual violence then I would see the sense in that. If the argument was that children ought to be exposed to images of homosexuality only in the context of images of heterosexuality I would see the argument. If the argument was that children ought to see sexual behaviour only in the presence of a responsible adult who could explain what's going on that would seem sensible.
But childern can't learn appropriate sexual behaviour unless they can see appropriate sexual behaviour. Cutting children off from observing appropriate sexual behaviour between adults is how we breed our amazing zoo of sexual inadequacies and, in particular, our rapists. We'd live in a much healthier society if we didn't keep sexuality hidden from children.
What's wrong with pushd/usr/src/linux; find . -name *.[ch] -exec cat {} \; | wc -l? Oh, and the answer in case you're interested is that Linux 2.4.20 is 4.25 million lines of code. The 80 lines which have allegedly been shown are an infinitesimally small proportion of that.
Which hardware would you rather buy for a new home linux system?
OK, lets start by saying I don't honestly know the answer to this because the last Mac I actually did anything serious with came with 128Kb (yes, that's a 'K') of memory (although it was later upgraded to 512Kb and that's still a 'K').
However it's my perception that apple hardware is on the whole substantially better build quality than equivalent generic PC boxes. Also, of course, architecturally they're much nicer. But you pay a very high premium for the better quality. I tend to home build my personal boxes using the best quality components I can get, so my current twin Athlon 1800 cost about 1100 UK pounds. To get equivalent performance on a Mac it looks like I'd have to pay 2099 UK pounds or nearly twice as much, and for that I'd get a single IDE disk instead of a SCSI RAID array.
So, beautiful machines but if you're going to throw MacOS into the bit bucket (as I would) at a scarey price. If you want really beautiful high quality hardware slightly behind the modern performance curve, buy a second-hand SGI box off ebay.
All I can say from the screenshots is that there may be usability issues. Icons are non-instructive, fonts are ugly, window decorations are misguiding (for example, what does the down arrow do ? minimize or close the app ?), etc etc.
I think you're missing the point.
fvwm and friends are not designed for or typically used by lusers. They are intended for and used by people who are in control of their machines and know how to manage them. If we don't like the icons or the window decorations, we'll just change them. My personal favourite, wm2, does not provide any icons at all, and the only way to configure it is to hack the source and recompile. But it's elegant and it doesn't get in my way.
Yes, so it wouldn't suit everybody. Who cares? I am not everybody, and one size does not fit all.
Frankly, I don't really see the point. I use a phone to make phone calls. (Duh!) OK, I do use SMS a bit, too.
But let's face it, prodding at that kind of keypad with an index finger is not a convenient user interface.
Frankly, I don't really see the point. I walk when I want to make journeys. I can carry things in my hands. Lets face it, pushing on the handles of that 'cart' thing with the 'wheels' on is not a convenient user interface... and who needs this newfangled fire stuff to keep warm? It's usually more convenient to just run around in circles for a bit.
Come on, guy. In your pockets at this moment you probably have three or four different devices (watch, PDA, phone, GPS, MP3 player, radio, camera, whatever) which have different incompatible batteries and need different incompatible chargers and plug into different incompatible incompatible accessories. So when you go anywhere you have to take this huge mess of kit. And at the end of it none of them are as good as a proper computer.
It does not have to be like this. You don't need half a dozen different information appliances with half a dozen different kinds of radio comms. You need one. It can't use (just) 802.11x, that's too energy-hungry, and it can't use (just) bluetooth, that's too short range. But it can just use GSM or GPRS. Yes, OK, the user interfaces still need some work (although I think QTopia is mostly fine); but we're getting very close to one mobile information device for all purposes. It's got to be good news.
xbox modding is ILLEGAL in any country with even the most basic of electronic intellectual property laws as you are using an ILLEGALLY modified BIOS image.. so please, stop acting as if it is evil of the microsoft oppressors to be claiming this as so.. so believe what you want, but unless you are using cromwell, xbox modding on the most basic level is equivalent to piracy
I live in Scotland. Here we have a fairly basic law called the Sale of Goods Act, which says, in effect, if you sell me something, it's mine and I can do what I like with it. Any 'license' which says I can't is just illegal as in against the law.
So I can change any chip or use the whole thing as a flowerpot if I like, and there is nothing that Microsoft can do about it. This is true in just about every country in the world... except, of course, the <irony>Home of the Free</irony>.
Do you know how to read? Try reading the GPL. It requires any derivative works to also be GPL. That's a restriction, because it means you can never make software that is available for sale from anything that has been opened as GPL.
No, it's not a restriction at all. No-one forces you to make a derivative work. If you don't like the licence the original author used, you can do a clean room reimplementation - something I personally have had to do a number of times.
Pretty serious restriction, if you ask a professional programmer. I am one, I know.
Yes, sonny, we know. Most of us here are; I have been for eighteen years. It doesn't give you the right to steal other people's work.
Take any software patent for example. Sure, it's patented, but some enterprising young college student (anyone for this matter) makes their own implementation of the patent and releases it on the web as Open Source (and/or Free) software anonymously. That implementation turns out to be really rather decent and becomes widespread, perhaps more widespread than the "official" implementation. Improvements and additions are added (anonymously) and the unofficial becomes the unofficial-official.
Are the users of the unofficial implementation liable for patent infringement? I'd say no, but I'm not a lawyer. Is the creator liable? Probably, but who'll ever know?
Yes, they are
The owner of the technology will know who has bought licences. So, if you're using the technology and you haven't bought a license, you're infringing.
Personally I think software patents are a very bad thing and am lobbying as hard as possible to prevent them being instituted in Europe; but I think the current W3C document is a compromise I can live with.
But you're essentially right that patents and the extension of copyright are the twenty-first century enclosure of the commons, and that civil disobedience is the correct response.
No, the GPL does not make that impossible at least in a legal sense. I can stick as many license agreements and copywrite notices around a piece of code as I want, if I don't actually have the rights to do so it isn't binding. So if there actually is tainted code in Linux then it does cause jeapordy regardless of the GPL since the GPL doesn't apply.
But I have here a boxed copy of Caldera's own Linux, with the kernel source supplied to me under the GPL. Since Caldera do own the UN*X source, then even if there is 'tainted' UNIX code in the Linux source Caldera undoubtedly did have the legal right to apply the GPL to it and they supplied it to me under the GPL. So the GPL says I can supply it to anyone else...
You are an idiot. These are perfect for anyone who needs a truly portable computer. No, laptops aren't really portable. They have to sit on something flat, have a power connection (most have an under-2-hours battery life, thus rendering the battery useless for those of us who actually USE computers) , and not be moved around. They also weigh several pounds, and are very uncomfortable to carry around.
Besides, comparing the Sharp devices to the Libretto is just ludicrous. The Libretto was huge, heavy, and had a short battery life. It had all the shortcomings of a notebook with none of its benefits. You couldn't put it in your pocket, could you?
OK, I have both a Libretto and a Zaurus. I love my Libretto. The Zaurus was a fun toy for a bit and if it actually worked well would be good, but it has too many little problems (the worst of which I could probably sort out if I invested the time but I'm now fed up with it so I don't).
OK, you can't fit the Libretto into a shirt pocket, but you can't really fit the Zaurus either. You can fit it into most overcoat pockets. OK, the Libretto's battery life is really crap - but the Zaurus's battery life is no better if you have an 802.11b card in, and if you try to take the card out it sulks, and won't recognise the card again if you put it back, so you've no network... unless you reboot, and about one time in ten the reboot doesn't work and loses all the stuff you have in the filesystem. The Libretto, by contrast, just works.
Again, the Libretto is a real computer - mine has Oracle, Postgres, Apache, Tomcat and all my own applications on it, so I can walk into a customer site with this ridiculous little box and demonstrate a whole suite of client-server applications. It may be old, but it still knocks people out. Also, you can really type on the keyboard. The Zaurus keyboard sort of works, but it's painful. The handwriting recognition is better - except the membrane over the screen gets scratched by the stylus, so mine has a dull patch over the writing area which is really annoying.
Finally, my Libretto runs perfectly ordinary vanilla-flavour Debian 3. It's a very comfortable user environment. The Zaurus logs the user in as root, and has a clumsy and awkward-to-use file system layout. It's security is very poor, with an open password-less FTP server which (again) logs all comers in as root.
In summary I think my Libretto is a briliant machine and the best yet stab at ultra-portable real computing. THe Zaurus is an interesting prototype of a machine which with further development might become usable, but in its present state is a gimmicky toy.
Yea, our "horrible system" has created one of the most free societies in history. This horrible system beckons millions to our shores in pursuit of a better life, to live in a country where they actually have a political voice. This horrible system insures that no tyrant or dictatorship could ever take power. This horrible system protects the minority while respecting the majority.
You know, it's very hard to tell whether you're being sarcastic, satirical, or serious. I hope you're not being serious.
I don't know what it looks like from the inside, but those of us who don't live in the US look across the Atlantic and see a country where the head of state got in as a result of a fraudulent election run by his own brother; where civil rights are being progressively torn up and destroyed; which breaks solemn international treaties as if they didn't matter.
Wake up and smell the coffee! It looks to the rest of us asi if a tyrant has very successfully seized power over you, as a result of a minority riding roughshod over the interests of the majority.
As President Mugabe of Zimbabwe said, no foreign observer could possibly have found the last presidential election in the United States 'Free and Fair'. And he's a man who knows a lot about how to 'run' a democracy.
The US govt. protects the rights of individuals. It shouldn't be promoting a social agenda at the expense of individual rights, including the right to own IP.
Oi!
Where did 'the right to own IP' come from? There was no such right when David wrote the psalms. There was no such right when Paul wrote his epistles. The 'right to own IP' is an invention of governments. What happened to my right to listen to music which I've paid for? What happened to my right to play, adapt, and reinterpret a song I've heard, or retell a story I've been told?
Now there's a basic right - a right without which popular music as we know it could not exist, without which it would be impossible to talk to your mates about the TV you watched last night.
Why should governments protect the big corporations who own these media 'rights' against ordinary citizens? What governments have created, governments have a responsibility to control.
I went round to see a friend last night. She is a mostly sensible, mostly reasonable, fairly tech literate person. Her values are on the whole mostly in the right place. She runs a small bunsiness and until recently her business has been mostly servicing a government contract. That contract ended and was not renewed. She has laid off most of her staff, but she has no income and still two employees to pay, and she's desperate to find new work.
A couple of months ago she came and talked to me about how to set up a bulk email thing and I thought I'd succeeded in persuading her that it was a seriously bad idea and she shouldn't do it. Apparently I hadn't; last night she told me she'd started sending bulk UCE.
This isn't someone whom I'd describe as sleazy, and it isn't someone who's stupid. It's someone who is desperate. I think you will find a lot of spammers are.
The problem can be tackled, it seems to me, at two levels. Yes, if there's legislation (particularly if it has real teeth) then peopel will get a good clue that this is not a good thing to do. But it also needs there to be a professional ethic among systems and network administrators that we will not allow the infrastructure we control to be used for this sort of thing, and that we will kick offenders off and cancel accounts; and that if our management say different we will refuse to work for them - a sort of hypocratic oath for geeks.
I have a mercury delay line transmitter and receiver (but not the mercory-filled tube which used to fit between them) from a LEO mark 2, although I don't know which machine they came out of. I have a power supply unit (one of many in the original machine) from The Corby Steelworks LEO Mark III machine.
What I'm getting tired of having to point out is that signal to noise on [insert your favorite human communication vector] is inversly proportional to the number of people who are allowed to speak. Through true freedom of speach comes noise. Through the application of intelligent filtering you can interpret this noisy spectrum just as you would any other
I just don't accept this. Noise is a result of bad manners and selfishness. Most people voluntarily refrain from bad manners and selfishness. Slashdot to some extent protects itself from the effects of the tiny, destructive minority who for reasons of egotism or spite seek to destroy the information systems they use. Real-life social fora (such as bars) protect themselves from antisocial egotists by, er, physical persuasion. Usenet has no such mechanisms for self protection.
Among other things I'm control for the scot.* hierarchy. Currently we're having an election campaign in Scotland - we're voting on Thursday. It's quite an important election because for hte first time ever the nationalists could be the largest party. But if you were to look at scot.politics you'd never know this, because the group has been effectively destroyed by the actions of trolls. What makes it even more painful is that the principal troll has (or claims to have) no relation to Scotland - he doesn't live here, he has no scots ancestry, and his only interest is to destroy for the sake of.
For twenty years Usenet has been a vey important part of my social life, but like Spaf I now feel that it is dying. And I think that is extremely sad. I think it's a crashing indictment of modern standards of behaviour and manners that people are prepared to willfully and casually destroy something which has been so valuable to so many.
Bad behaviour is voluntary. No-one is compelled to be destructive. Freedom of speech does not cause people to behave badly, it only permits them to. Usenet, as a semi-anonymous virtual arena, doesn't have the normal social sanctions on bad behaviour - but just because you won't get beaten up for being abusive or antisocial does not force you to be antisocial.
Thinking about this makes me feel very old, and very depressed.
Code editors in Unix are WAY behind what you can get on a windows box. I loved Coderite in its day, now the visual development environments are much better at what emacs does, without the overhead of having to learn a new operating environment.
Thus speaks someone who can't use emacs. Not surprising - emacs is opaque and hard to learn. But once you have learned it you'll never go back.
Slashdot Mirror
Worked for me. Konqi 3.1.1
Been in exactly this situation about three years ago, except that as chief geek I owned half the company. I said I was leaving, and did a deal with the suits that they would buy me out for UKP25,000. Two months later suits said they couldn't pay me and would I buy them out - so I offered them UKP1 and they accepted. I then gutted all the assets out of the company except one customer account and sold the company on for UKP1 to the consultant who was running that account, but that's another story. We've never looked back - much less stress, much less work (because we're carrying so much less overhead the company doesn't need to earn so much) and we're able to pay ourselves more, not less.
Make sure you have good relationships with key customers and that those customers know which team has the competence to deliver after the split. Also make sure you aren't hit with a non-compete - they're not strictly legal here in the UK but it's still a hassle.
You are absolutely 100% wrong. The Linux kernel is most certainly not in the public domain. It is copyright Linus Torvalds. If the copyright owner chooses to allow you to make copies and to modify them under the terms of the GNU general public license (as he does), that's his privilege under copyright law. It most definitely does not make his work public domain.
If someone sends me an email, they are most definitely targetting me. The fact that they don't know who I am is not an excuse - it makes it worse.
OK, this is where I think the whole of western society (and perhaps the United States most particularly) is sick and weird and different only in degree from the Taliban. We have a very sick, weird attitude to sexuality, and it underlies most of our social problems.
Sexual behaviour is normal behaviour. If it wasn't normal behaviour, we wouldn't exist as a species. Kids learn appropriate behaviour by observation. But western kids never learn appropriate sexual behaviour, because they're never allowed to see it. On the contrary, when they are exposed to images of implied sexuality it's very often in the context of action films where the sexuality is either co-ercive or manipulative.
If the argument was that children ought not to be exposed to images of sexual coercion or sexual violence then I would see the sense in that. If the argument was that children ought to be exposed to images of homosexuality only in the context of images of heterosexuality I would see the argument. If the argument was that children ought to see sexual behaviour only in the presence of a responsible adult who could explain what's going on that would seem sensible.
But childern can't learn appropriate sexual behaviour unless they can see appropriate sexual behaviour. Cutting children off from observing appropriate sexual behaviour between adults is how we breed our amazing zoo of sexual inadequacies and, in particular, our rapists. We'd live in a much healthier society if we didn't keep sexuality hidden from children.
Oh I do hope so!
... oh, you meant legal suits? Well, those too, of course...
What's wrong with pushd /usr/src/linux; find . -name *.[ch] -exec cat {} \; | wc -l? Oh, and the answer in case you're interested is that Linux 2.4.20 is 4.25 million lines of code. The 80 lines which have allegedly been shown are an infinitesimally small proportion of that.
OK, lets start by saying I don't honestly know the answer to this because the last Mac I actually did anything serious with came with 128Kb (yes, that's a 'K') of memory (although it was later upgraded to 512Kb and that's still a 'K').
However it's my perception that apple hardware is on the whole substantially better build quality than equivalent generic PC boxes. Also, of course, architecturally they're much nicer. But you pay a very high premium for the better quality. I tend to home build my personal boxes using the best quality components I can get, so my current twin Athlon 1800 cost about 1100 UK pounds. To get equivalent performance on a Mac it looks like I'd have to pay 2099 UK pounds or nearly twice as much, and for that I'd get a single IDE disk instead of a SCSI RAID array.
So, beautiful machines but if you're going to throw MacOS into the bit bucket (as I would) at a scarey price. If you want really beautiful high quality hardware slightly behind the modern performance curve, buy a second-hand SGI box off ebay.
I think you're missing the point.
fvwm and friends are not designed for or typically used by lusers. They are intended for and used by people who are in control of their machines and know how to manage them. If we don't like the icons or the window decorations, we'll just change them. My personal favourite, wm2 , does not provide any icons at all, and the only way to configure it is to hack the source and recompile. But it's elegant and it doesn't get in my way.
Yes, so it wouldn't suit everybody. Who cares? I am not everybody, and one size does not fit all.
The French telephone network has been entirely packet switched since at least 1968. Oh, well, America gets there in the end...
Frankly, I don't really see the point. I walk when I want to make journeys. I can carry things in my hands. Lets face it, pushing on the handles of that 'cart' thing with the 'wheels' on is not a convenient user interface... and who needs this newfangled fire stuff to keep warm? It's usually more convenient to just run around in circles for a bit.
Come on, guy. In your pockets at this moment you probably have three or four different devices (watch, PDA, phone, GPS, MP3 player, radio, camera, whatever) which have different incompatible batteries and need different incompatible chargers and plug into different incompatible incompatible accessories. So when you go anywhere you have to take this huge mess of kit. And at the end of it none of them are as good as a proper computer.
It does not have to be like this. You don't need half a dozen different information appliances with half a dozen different kinds of radio comms. You need one. It can't use (just) 802.11x, that's too energy-hungry, and it can't use (just) bluetooth, that's too short range. But it can just use GSM or GPRS. Yes, OK, the user interfaces still need some work (although I think QTopia is mostly fine); but we're getting very close to one mobile information device for all purposes. It's got to be good news.
Does anyone know if this is the Linux powered motorola phone?
I live in Scotland. Here we have a fairly basic law called the Sale of Goods Act, which says, in effect, if you sell me something, it's mine and I can do what I like with it. Any 'license' which says I can't is just illegal as in against the law.
So I can change any chip or use the whole thing as a flowerpot if I like, and there is nothing that Microsoft can do about it. This is true in just about every country in the world... except, of course, the <irony>Home of the Free</irony>.
...imagine a beowulf cluster of these....
No, it's not a restriction at all. No-one forces you to make a derivative work. If you don't like the licence the original author used, you can do a clean room reimplementation - something I personally have had to do a number of times.
Yes, sonny, we know. Most of us here are; I have been for eighteen years. It doesn't give you the right to steal other people's work.
Personally I think software patents are a very bad thing and am lobbying as hard as possible to prevent them being instituted in Europe; but I think the current W3C document is a compromise I can live with.
But you're essentially right that patents and the extension of copyright are the twenty-first century enclosure of the commons, and that civil disobedience is the correct response.
But I have here a boxed copy of Caldera's own Linux, with the kernel source supplied to me under the GPL. Since Caldera do own the UN*X source, then even if there is 'tainted' UNIX code in the Linux source Caldera undoubtedly did have the legal right to apply the GPL to it and they supplied it to me under the GPL. So the GPL says I can supply it to anyone else...
See that boot? It's got a bullet hole in.
We'll all be painting circles on our back lawns to show the pigs where to land. PORKAIR061, clear for landing.
OK, I have both a Libretto and a Zaurus. I love my Libretto. The Zaurus was a fun toy for a bit and if it actually worked well would be good, but it has too many little problems (the worst of which I could probably sort out if I invested the time but I'm now fed up with it so I don't).
OK, you can't fit the Libretto into a shirt pocket, but you can't really fit the Zaurus either. You can fit it into most overcoat pockets. OK, the Libretto's battery life is really crap - but the Zaurus's battery life is no better if you have an 802.11b card in, and if you try to take the card out it sulks, and won't recognise the card again if you put it back, so you've no network... unless you reboot, and about one time in ten the reboot doesn't work and loses all the stuff you have in the filesystem. The Libretto, by contrast, just works.
Again, the Libretto is a real computer - mine has Oracle, Postgres, Apache, Tomcat and all my own applications on it, so I can walk into a customer site with this ridiculous little box and demonstrate a whole suite of client-server applications. It may be old, but it still knocks people out. Also, you can really type on the keyboard. The Zaurus keyboard sort of works, but it's painful. The handwriting recognition is better - except the membrane over the screen gets scratched by the stylus, so mine has a dull patch over the writing area which is really annoying.
Finally, my Libretto runs perfectly ordinary vanilla-flavour Debian 3. It's a very comfortable user environment. The Zaurus logs the user in as root, and has a clumsy and awkward-to-use file system layout. It's security is very poor, with an open password-less FTP server which (again) logs all comers in as root.
In summary I think my Libretto is a briliant machine and the best yet stab at ultra-portable real computing. THe Zaurus is an interesting prototype of a machine which with further development might become usable, but in its present state is a gimmicky toy.
You know, it's very hard to tell whether you're being sarcastic, satirical, or serious. I hope you're not being serious.
I don't know what it looks like from the inside, but those of us who don't live in the US look across the Atlantic and see a country where the head of state got in as a result of a fraudulent election run by his own brother; where civil rights are being progressively torn up and destroyed; which breaks solemn international treaties as if they didn't matter.
Wake up and smell the coffee! It looks to the rest of us asi if a tyrant has very successfully seized power over you, as a result of a minority riding roughshod over the interests of the majority.
As President Mugabe of Zimbabwe said, no foreign observer could possibly have found the last presidential election in the United States 'Free and Fair'. And he's a man who knows a lot about how to 'run' a democracy.
Oi!
Where did 'the right to own IP' come from? There was no such right when David wrote the psalms. There was no such right when Paul wrote his epistles. The 'right to own IP' is an invention of governments. What happened to my right to listen to music which I've paid for? What happened to my right to play, adapt, and reinterpret a song I've heard, or retell a story I've been told?
Now there's a basic right - a right without which popular music as we know it could not exist, without which it would be impossible to talk to your mates about the TV you watched last night.
Why should governments protect the big corporations who own these media 'rights' against ordinary citizens? What governments have created, governments have a responsibility to control.
A couple of months ago she came and talked to me about how to set up a bulk email thing and I thought I'd succeeded in persuading her that it was a seriously bad idea and she shouldn't do it. Apparently I hadn't; last night she told me she'd started sending bulk UCE.
This isn't someone whom I'd describe as sleazy, and it isn't someone who's stupid. It's someone who is desperate. I think you will find a lot of spammers are.
The problem can be tackled, it seems to me, at two levels. Yes, if there's legislation (particularly if it has real teeth) then peopel will get a good clue that this is not a good thing to do. But it also needs there to be a professional ethic among systems and network administrators that we will not allow the infrastructure we control to be used for this sort of thing, and that we will kick offenders off and cancel accounts; and that if our management say different we will refuse to work for them - a sort of hypocratic oath for geeks.
I have a mercury delay line transmitter and receiver (but not the mercory-filled tube which used to fit between them) from a LEO mark 2, although I don't know which machine they came out of. I have a power supply unit (one of many in the original machine) from The Corby Steelworks LEO Mark III machine.
I just don't accept this. Noise is a result of bad manners and selfishness. Most people voluntarily refrain from bad manners and selfishness. Slashdot to some extent protects itself from the effects of the tiny, destructive minority who for reasons of egotism or spite seek to destroy the information systems they use. Real-life social fora (such as bars) protect themselves from antisocial egotists by, er, physical persuasion. Usenet has no such mechanisms for self protection.
Among other things I'm control for the scot.* hierarchy. Currently we're having an election campaign in Scotland - we're voting on Thursday. It's quite an important election because for hte first time ever the nationalists could be the largest party. But if you were to look at scot.politics you'd never know this, because the group has been effectively destroyed by the actions of trolls. What makes it even more painful is that the principal troll has (or claims to have) no relation to Scotland - he doesn't live here, he has no scots ancestry, and his only interest is to destroy for the sake of.
For twenty years Usenet has been a vey important part of my social life, but like Spaf I now feel that it is dying. And I think that is extremely sad. I think it's a crashing indictment of modern standards of behaviour and manners that people are prepared to willfully and casually destroy something which has been so valuable to so many.
Bad behaviour is voluntary. No-one is compelled to be destructive. Freedom of speech does not cause people to behave badly, it only permits them to. Usenet, as a semi-anonymous virtual arena, doesn't have the normal social sanctions on bad behaviour - but just because you won't get beaten up for being abusive or antisocial does not force you to be antisocial.
Thinking about this makes me feel very old, and very depressed.
Thus speaks someone who can't use emacs. Not surprising - emacs is opaque and hard to learn. But once you have learned it you'll never go back.