OK, fair point, but that still leaves the ultimate question for all fans of so-called "anarchocapitalism":
"When are you planning on moving to Somalia?"
And the inevitable followup question "What? Never? Are you some kind of racist?"
Actually, that last bit was a bit gratuituous - but hey, condemning thousands of people to poverty, exploitation, prostitution, violence and disease is "a bit gratuitious", too, I reckons.
Ouch. I'd hate to be the attorney for him. I'd guess you'd have to be a complete psycho (like that guy obviously is) to even consider being his attorney for that lawsuit.
Still, there's no shortage of those in the legal profession.
If the EU has the final word, then why have they still not gotten Microsoft to comply with local antitrust laws after several years of trying?
Because they're actually pretty corrupt. What you're seeing is them being more lenient than they should have been with Microsoft.
However, despite being pretty corrupt, they seem to be doing a much better job of prosecuting MS for anti-trust than either the Clinton or Bush administrations. Go figure...
In the UK this would be flat-out illegal, because we have sane data privacy laws. Everybody who stores data about you (except certain exempt users such as the police) are required by law to tell you what will be stored and for what purpose, and they're required to only use it for that purpose and destroy it after it's no longer needed for that purpose. Political parties are certainly not exempt from this.
This raises an interesting question. So the cops can purchase the commission of an illegal act (hacking into computers) in the course of an investigation? Isn't this technically in breach of the Fourth Amendment?
I know hacking into someone's computer to send spam is pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things, but couldn't they also use it as a subterfurge to spy on people, by "hiring spies" to "trap private investigators who were acting outside the law" - and "oops" (completely accidentally!) gain valuable information about political dissidents in the process? Where is the line drawn?
Could the cops also order the assassination of someone, say in order to trap an assassin? Or order the brutalisation and rape of someone?
It's Westeners who are furthering the radicals stereotype?!
Yes, absolutely. Check out Ann Coulter's recent comments for an example. Ann Coulter, unfortunately, speaks for many, and is (again unfortunately) not roundly condemned as a lunatic by the right in the US.
Sending medical records unencrypted over email, SMS, etc. would almost certainly be illegal throughout the US (due to HIPPA) and the EU (due to Data Protection). At least, I hope so.
I don't know what you're talking about. Fedora has all the development stuff included. Just choose the "Everything" option - that's the easiest way to select it.
In fact, care to name a single distro that doesn't ship with compilers?
Actually, relatively speaking they aren't the lackeys.
Google are telling Chinese users when their search results have been censored - in line with their general policy (like with DMCA takedowns). No-one else is.
Google aren't exporting their workforce to China to curry favour with the Chinese government. Cisco are.
And I know of no instances where Google has intentionally assisted the Chinese authorities to catch or prosecute a political dissident. Yahoo has.
And talking of 1984-style regimes which use their constitution for toilet paper (or regimes headed in that direction), Google is resisting the Bush administration's attempts to get an entire week's worth of search histories from Google.
If you're concerned about the fourth estate holding the government to account, I advise checking out a non-profit online newspaper, which takes no ads and therefore cannot be pressured by advertisers to tone down certain stories:
Seriously, why is this old fart talking about the "King's English"? It can't be because he's British - Even in England we don't talk about the King's English, because we haven't had a King for over 50 years.
As a matter of fact, ANY region that is permanently dependent on outside help is just plain overpopulated, no matter how much food is produced or even wasted in other regions.
Any big city (such as London) is permanently dependent on outside help. You can't grow much wheat in the middle of a city, or raise many cows.
Oh, you mean dependent on outside wealth? Well, that's an economic problem, not a problem of "there are inherently too many people living here".
That's not technically possible to do in software. Even if it were, they've thought of that - competent computer forensics investigators make bit-for-bit copies of a hard drive before doing anything - before even switching the machine on.
You could possibly do it in hardware though, if you could create a hard drive that would self-destruct on any attempt to open it.
They were doing something which they believed was useful - it just wasn't that useful with regard to what they had been hired to do. It was one of those "extensible framework" ideas, way overkill for the task - something which Agile methodologies counsel against ("build what you need now, and only what you need now").
That said the biggest proof that this guy could be a crank is the fact that this story got posted on Slashdot, where something like 90% of the science stories are crap.
Especially the ones about "innovations" from Israel. Anyone else notice that?
Anyone who has watched the antics of the left over the last fifty years knows it is only an intermediate step along the way to their goal of crimethink laws, i.e. making it against the law to disagree with Democrats.
You have a very mixed-up view. I'll just disprove this claim very simply. Noam Chomsky is a well-known member of the American far left. Noam Chomsky disagrees with most Democrats in the House of Represenatives on a number of key issues, including the use of force in international affairs. Therefore, it would not make any sense for Noam Chomsky to support a law that outlaws opinions that are different from those held by Democrats.
In point of fact there is no evidence of a generalized left-wing plot to criminalise all opinions that are different from those held by Democrats, because otherwise you would provide it. You have a conspiracy for which you have absolutely no evidence. What we call this is a "conspiracy theory", and it's quite a derogatory term, suggesting the proponent is of low intelligence. You might want to think about that.
Microsoft is a special case though, because it's really cash-rich, and incredibly monopolistic - both of which will ensure that it survives in some form for at least 10 years, and probably at least 30.
Re:Something about the mozilla suite on linux?
on
A History of Firefox
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I'm not sure what fork you're talking about - Mozilla products have always ran on both Linux and Windows, since the earliest days. There have been forks, but to "slim down" the browser, not to focus on Windows AFAIK.
If he's got ironclad proof that the Bush administration hoaxed everyone on the way to Iraq
Isn't it obvious by now that that's what happened? Let's talk about Powell's address to the UN. Let's talk about the "45 minutes" claim, propounded by Bush's buddy Blair and echoed by the Bush administration. I could go on.
Are you some kind of Fox-News-watching idiot? I know Bill O'Reilly and co like to tell you up is down and left is right but that don't make it so. No WMDs were found, and Saddam and Al-Quaeda were mortal enemies. Period. (I take it you're not attempting to deny that the middle east is fucked - that's been true for a while.)
Please. You can create a contract spelling out who owns what (it would be equivalent to your argument). Indeed you could do this for a spouse, business partner, child etc.
This highlights an interesting opportunity for highly corrupt governments (I know all governments are corrupt, but some are more corrupt than others). If the accepted norm is that mistakes are made by the automated systems all the time, and you will be treated with absolute disrespect and given the run around if you try to complain, then what's to stop a corrupt government sending out thousands of bogus fines, and claiming they were "computer errors" if called on it? A certain percentage of people will simply pay the fines without contest, especially if the fines are quite small relative to their income.
The analogy with the RIAA should be obvious. Only the situation with the RIAA is worse from the citizen's point of view, because it costs thousands of dollars to "properly" defend yourself against the RIAA (i.e. hiring a lawyer), whereas sending a letter to the government to contest your penalty costs the price of a stamp.
Under the UK Data Protection Act (and similar laws in the rest of the EU) anyone has the right to request what information an organisation holds on them, and organisations are obligated to delete or correct any factually incorrect information after the person has shown them it is factually incorrect.
Unfortunately there is a big long list of exceptions (most obviously the police and the "security services", but also some others).
Slashdot Mirror
"When are you planning on moving to Somalia?"
And the inevitable followup question "What? Never? Are you some kind of racist?"
Actually, that last bit was a bit gratuituous - but hey, condemning thousands of people to poverty, exploitation, prostitution, violence and disease is "a bit gratuitious", too, I reckons.
Still, there's no shortage of those in the legal profession.
Because they're actually pretty corrupt. What you're seeing is them being more lenient than they should have been with Microsoft.
However, despite being pretty corrupt, they seem to be doing a much better job of prosecuting MS for anti-trust than either the Clinton or Bush administrations. Go figure...
I know hacking into someone's computer to send spam is pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things, but couldn't they also use it as a subterfurge to spy on people, by "hiring spies" to "trap private investigators who were acting outside the law" - and "oops" (completely accidentally!) gain valuable information about political dissidents in the process? Where is the line drawn?
Could the cops also order the assassination of someone, say in order to trap an assassin? Or order the brutalisation and rape of someone?
Yes, absolutely. Check out Ann Coulter's recent comments for an example. Ann Coulter, unfortunately, speaks for many, and is (again unfortunately) not roundly condemned as a lunatic by the right in the US.
In fact, care to name a single distro that doesn't ship with compilers?
Google are telling Chinese users when their search results have been censored - in line with their general policy (like with DMCA takedowns). No-one else is.
Google aren't exporting their workforce to China to curry favour with the Chinese government. Cisco are.
And I know of no instances where Google has intentionally assisted the Chinese authorities to catch or prosecute a political dissident. Yahoo has.
And talking of 1984-style regimes which use their constitution for toilet paper (or regimes headed in that direction), Google is resisting the Bush administration's attempts to get an entire week's worth of search histories from Google.
The New Standard.
Any big city (such as London) is permanently dependent on outside help. You can't grow much wheat in the middle of a city, or raise many cows.
Oh, you mean dependent on outside wealth? Well, that's an economic problem, not a problem of "there are inherently too many people living here".
You could possibly do it in hardware though, if you could create a hard drive that would self-destruct on any attempt to open it.
Especially the ones about "innovations" from Israel. Anyone else notice that?
You have a very mixed-up view. I'll just disprove this claim very simply. Noam Chomsky is a well-known member of the American far left. Noam Chomsky disagrees with most Democrats in the House of Represenatives on a number of key issues, including the use of force in international affairs. Therefore, it would not make any sense for Noam Chomsky to support a law that outlaws opinions that are different from those held by Democrats.
In point of fact there is no evidence of a generalized left-wing plot to criminalise all opinions that are different from those held by Democrats, because otherwise you would provide it. You have a conspiracy for which you have absolutely no evidence. What we call this is a "conspiracy theory", and it's quite a derogatory term, suggesting the proponent is of low intelligence. You might want to think about that.
Isn't it obvious by now that that's what happened? Let's talk about Powell's address to the UN. Let's talk about the "45 minutes" claim, propounded by Bush's buddy Blair and echoed by the Bush administration. I could go on.
That's his point. Well, kind of.
The analogy with the RIAA should be obvious. Only the situation with the RIAA is worse from the citizen's point of view, because it costs thousands of dollars to "properly" defend yourself against the RIAA (i.e. hiring a lawyer), whereas sending a letter to the government to contest your penalty costs the price of a stamp.
Unfortunately there is a big long list of exceptions (most obviously the police and the "security services", but also some others).